A Georgia Tech team exhibit, which won a People’s Choice Award while on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently, will be on display in the School of Architecture. Willkens leads the team of student researchers who created the exhibit.

The exhibit, “Walking in the Footsteps of History,” immerses visitors in the spatial and cultural context of Selma, Alabama, around the time of “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. Willkens’ team put the exhibit together for this year’s Accelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival.

“This exhibit explores a geospatial timeline of the marches in the region, largely focusing on the time between the prayer vigil held in Marion, AL on the evening of February 18th, 1965, resulting in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, to the arrival of the marchers to the Alabama Capitol Building on March 25, 1965,” Willkens said.

Although focused on the past, the exhibit serves as part of an ongoing effort to preserve and restore historically significant places that have been ignored.

“Our exhibit hopes to prompt a deeper inquiry into the city of Selma,” Willkens said, “advocating for the preservation of sites frequently ignored in the conversation: Good Samaritan Hospital (the only site that treated Black patients in the region), Brown’s Chapel and the surrounding complex known as the George Washington Carver Homes, and the area around the Bloody Sunday conflict site that is in a precarious state of decline.”

Contemporary digital reconstructions such as this offer visitors the chance to connect with history more directly than previously possible. Viewers can explore documents too fragile for public access, or tour sites which are hard to access or no longer exist.

“In many ways, this is a visualization of civil rights conflict archaeology, and we hope that our project’s methods for capturing contemporary digital documentation of associated sites (3D scans of sites, aerial photogrammetry, and 360 videos) and melding this content with rich historical narratives and archival images, videos, oral histories, and documents can become a reputable workflow for other sites, bringing history to life in new ways.”

The exhibit uses multiple media interfaces to stimulate viewer engagement. “This is an interactive exhibit, where the model with projection mapping, the touchscreen interfaces, VR experiences, and interpretive column complement each other to tell a broader story about Selma, the marches in 1965, and the ongoing struggle to protect voting rights,” Willkens said.

Willkens has been working in Selma since 2015, collaborating with researchers from Auburn University. “Our collaborations also expanded to include city officials, museum professionals, librarians, archivists, and teachers from Selma, as well as people from the Department of Transportation, tourism offices, the local interpretive centers for the National Park Service, and local entrepreneurs,” Willkens said.

“Amid all of our project partners, it has been most enlightening and rewarding to collaborate with a few of the remaining foot soldiers and their descendants who have been working so hard to preserve and disseminate the full story of Selma.”

Research and exhibit design team
•    Danielle Willkens, PhD, Assistant Professor
•    Junshan Liu, GT Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor 
•    Sydnee Henry, M.Arch candidate
•    Sean Li, BS Architecture candidate
•    Sakshi Nanda, MS in Urban Design candidate
•    Patricia J. Rangel, M.Arch candidate
•    Christian Waweru, BS Architecture candidate
•    Eden Wright, M.Arch candidate
•    Thomas Bray, BS Architecture 2021
•    So Min Park, BS Architecture 2021

GT Arts 
-    Aaron Shackleford, Director 
-    Kara Wade, Student and Artist Engagement Coordinator 
-    Nathalie Matychak, Assistant Director - Producing & Residency

Trees naturally capture carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas, and Georgia already has a registry for carbon held by living trees. But trees used for construction also hold about half their weight in carbon, Gentry said.

“So if you have 100,000 pounds of wood in your building, then there’s 50,000 pounds of carbon that’s sequestered in that wood [for the life of the building].”

Gentry will lead the committee’s approach as they create a carbon-tracking process for trees used in construction. Wood building materials will then be part of the state’s carbon registry, which will allow carbon credits to be bought and sold.

The committee also relies on Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, to determine net carbon benefit of sustainable materials versus conventional construction materials.

Thomas brings expertise in life cycle assessment to the committee. She looks at the whole life of the building material, from manufacture to disposal, to develop an accurate idea of environmental impact.

“Some of the part I’m especially tasked with is, ‘How do you quantify this? How much is it?’,” Thomas said.

It’s not as simple as adding up the weight of lumber used and dividing by half. “We have transportation, sawmills, and treatment,” she said, “and we’re probably using fossil fuels to do it.”

The environmental cost of all those processes must be compared to the costs of processes associated with concrete and metal frame buildings.

To make sure the credit for captured carbon is meaningful, “We have to look at all that to make sure the comparison is quantitatively sensible.”

California and Canada's British Columbia have related carbon-tracking systems, which provide incentives for using their timber in construction.

“Georgia is the largest forestry state in terms of structural lumber production,” said Gentry, “but we don’t have a lot of mass timber being produced from Southern Pine, so that’s considered to be a competitive disadvantage for the southeastern United States.”

This amendment to the current carbon registry provides incentive to use Georgia timber in construction, rather than bringing it in from other states. It will also help builders prove their commitment to greener development, Gentry said.

“Mass timber ties the logging and forestry industry -- a core business of rural Georgia -- to Atlanta where we have this huge influx of people. Cities need to build lots of multifamily housing, but in a thoughtful and environmentally conscious way,” said Gentry.

“This project speaks so well to both Georgias, and I think that’s part of the challenge we see in many things right now, is knitting that together. If there’s a win on both sides, it’s a good win.”

Building Taller and Cleaner with Mass Timber

At the Digital Building Lab, Georgia Tech researchers develop new ways of using mass timber in commercial construction.

“Mass timber is a process of cutting a tree up into lots of small pieces, essentially observing and removing the defects and then putting those boards back together to make huge pieces of wood,” said Gentry.

“This could be a panel of wood 10 feet by 40 feet by a foot and a half thick,” he said. “That's like a piece of plywood on steroids. That can become a floor system in a 20-story building.”

Mass timber is a relatively new technology: in 2021 Georgia building codes were updated to allow for timber buildings taller than 5 stories using the new mass timber technology. These changes allow for taller and more cost-competitive mass timber buildings.

Very few buildings in the state use mass timber technology. Two local examples are the Kendeda Building, on the Georgia Tech campus, and T3 West Midtown, a 7-story office building in Atlantic Station, near the Georgia Tech Campus.

Although the committee is not the first research group to look at carbon held in buildings, they will still have to develop new models to compare how much wood construction captures carbon as compared to traditional steel, Thomas said.

But, she said, the research is so new that “we can’t just look at what everybody else does and say, ‘that's what we're doing’.”

According to Thomas, the committee is “defining the regulations that will make it possible to have mass timber buildings that sequester carbon in the state of Georgia, and I expect that the procedure we use will be used by others also in the USA and in other countries. So we’re directly applying our expertise to support the state of Georgia.”

One implicit consequence of the amended carbon registry is that it “encourages building these innovative types of buildings in Georgia,” said Thomas.

“I grow my tree. I cut it down. I make a building with it so it's just sitting over there for hopefully a very long time. And then I grow another tree. So I'm taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into buildings on a continuing basis.”

For carbon sequestration to have an impact on the environment, “we're not talking one or two buildings in Atlanta. It has to be really large scale,” said Thomas.

“If we’re going to get the climate stabilized at 1.5 degrees centigrade increase, we’ve got to have some kind of technology for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.”

Growing a New Industry at Georgia Tech

And cultivating a new type of construction is no small endeavor, Gentry said.

“The mass timber problem is one of integration. It’s not like there’s a specific problem with adhesive bond lines or the density of wood. The real problem is the entire ecosystem that it’s going to take to make a mass timber industry in Georgia.”

Mass timber components require development of sophisticated manufacturing techniques.

“There’s tremendous capital expense for the presses that make these materials, and automation and CNC equipment that cuts these things into the kind of interlocking shapes that come to the job site and make these buildings so easy to erect,” Gentry said.

“In the Digital Fabrication Lab (DFL) we have much of that equipment. Our students are learning to run that equipment, and so this semester our students are exploring the design and economic potential of mass timber, looking at not only design of buildings, but also the technical aspects of prefabricating the components and bringing them to the site.”

The fact that Gentry and his students can prototype and deliver these building components right from the DFL amplifies the impact, he said. “I think one of the huge strengths of Georgia Tech is its ability to deliver not just knowledge, but instances of that knowledge applied.”

Gentry speaks from experience: he’s an alumnus of the Institute as well as a decades-long faculty member of the Schools of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering. So, too is another member of the Sustainable Building Material Technical Advisory Committee, Devon Dartnell (EE '84) Director of Market Analysis and Research at the Georgia Forestry Commission, and a Georgia timberland owner. Dartnell manages the work of the committee for the Forestry Commission.

The legislation identifies the specific viewpoints and expertise required to craft the new sustainable building carbon registry. Members include Edie Sonnie Hall, a life cycle analysis consultant from Washington State; Brian Campa, Principal at Cooper Carry; Jacek Siry, Professor of Forest Economics at the University of Georgia; Troy Harris, Managing Director of Timberland at Jamestown; Ted Miltiades, Director of Construction Codes and Industrialized Buildings at Georgia Department of Community Affairs; and Bill Howard,  General Manager of Claude Howard Lumber Company.

Architecture for Teens offers readers an overview of the basic elements of architecture—structure, program, aesthetics, and region. The book also shares the vast career opportunities for architects that range from residential and commercial design to historic preservation, landscape architecture, urban planning, and more. Using real world examples, Willkens presents architectural projects, colorful illustrations, and thoughtful details of their impact.

Willkens’ book was written with teens in mind to inspire and educate future architecture at younger ages. Even though the book is geared toward teens, it is a book for anyone with an interest in architecture. Architecture for Teens explores architectural movements and designers from pre-history to today while paying special attention toward building a more environmentally responsible world.

Architecture for Teens features projects and interviews by Andrew Daley, AIA of SHoP, Pascale Sablan, FAIA, NOMA, LEED AP of Adjaye Associates and Beyond the Built, Valerie Friedmann, urban planner for the City of Lexington, KY, and Pavan Iyer (Bachelor of Science in Architecture, ’14) , founder of eightvillage.

Willkens joined the School of Architecture in the fall of 2019.  She is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications.

Currently, Willkens is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Preservation Center, and a member of the Education Committee for the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s Southeast chapter. Since 2016, Danielle has participated in the research and documentation project for the spatial reconstruction of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She is currently the co-PI, with Auburn Assoc. Prof Junshan Liu, conducting a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, funded by the NPS African American Civil Rights Grant Program. 

Learn more and order your copy of Architecture for Teens.

The PFI Program within the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP) provides researchers from science and engineering disciplines funded by the NSF with the opportunity to take their research and technology from the discovery phase to the marketplace for the benefit of society. 

Russell Gentry, Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, serves as the project’s principal investigator (PI). The three-year grant continues Gentry’s research on the reuse of retired wind blades and builds on the proprietary technology developed as part of the Re-Wind Tripartite Research program funded by the U.S. NSF, Science Foundation of Ireland, and the Department for the Economy of Northern Ireland.  

“In our foundational NSF grants, our team demonstrated the potential for wind blade re-use and the positive environmental benefits that will come from the re-use of these amazing composite materials in civil infrastructure,” said Gentry. “This potential is embodied in the two patents we are pursuing and in the follow-on Partnership for Industry grant from NSF. The team is now advancing our hardware and software technology and has partnered with companies in the wind energy and electrical transmission industries to pilot these technologies.”

Logisticus Group joins the project as the key provider of transportation for the retired wind turbine blades. As one of the largest wind blade transporters, Logisticus Group brings supply expertise for the complex logistics of transporting decommissioned wind turbine blades, which are approximately 50 meters in length. 

"We are thrilled to partner with Georgia Tech on this project. Their team has always had a passion to conduct research and development on proprietary technology when it comes to reusing wind blades. We feel, as a company, that we need to be a part of the solution to find ways to recycle and repurpose these blades,” said Will Stephan, founder of Logisticus Group.”

Wind turbine blades are made from high-quality Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composite materials, which are not biodegradable or recyclable. Currently, turbine blades are landfilled or incinerated at their end-of-life stage. Georgia Tech and Logisticus will conduct research and development to commercialize mass-market architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) products from repurposed FRP composite of decommissioned wind turbine blades.

The team, comprised of Georgia Tech faculty, laboratory staff, and graduate and undergraduate students in architecture and engineering, will develop commercial products using Generative Design software, architecture studios, and workshops, structural and Finite element analysis, life-cycle analysis, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, and full-scale testing of prototypes in Georgia Tech’s 20,000 sq. ft. Digital Fabrication Laboratory. 

“The success of our project comes from the diverse talents and viewpoints represented on the team. It’s rare to have architects, engineers, and social, geospatial and environmental scientists working on the same fundamental problem,” said Gentry. “As we move to commercialize, we are building an entrepreneurial team and linking with industry. We look forward to seeing our re-use applications implemented in the next three years.” 

Prior to receiving the NSF PFI grant, researchers at Georgia Tech developed proprietary algorithms for a tool called the “Blade Machine” and created unique testing methodologies to rapidly characterize any wind turbine blade currently in production for architectural and structural analysis and design purposes. 

This fall the team is participating in the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program with Angie Nagle from the University College Cork in Ireland and Chloe Kiernicki, Bachelor of Science in Architecture student at Georgia Tech, serving as entrepreneurial leads.  James Marlow, founding CEO of Atlanta-based Radiance Solar, is serving as the I-Corps team’s industrial mentor.

About the Georgia Tech School of Architecture

The Georgia Tech School of Architecture offers five distinct degree programs – a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, a Master of Architecture, a Master of Science in Architecture, a Master of Science in Urban Design, and a Ph.D. in Architecture.  Embedded in the heart of Atlanta and a part of a top-ranked research institution, the School of Architecture combines research, technology, and design to form a well-rounded, interdisciplinary, future-focused education as students prepare to make an impact on the built environment.  www.arch.gatech.edu

About Logisticus Group

Logisticus Group (LLC), a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), specializes in transportation logistics, project management, and technology solutions serving projects throughout North and South America. At Logisticus Group, we believe our processes, technology solutions, personnel, and business model deliver a more predictable, controlled, efficient, and expedited project. To learn more visit, www.logisticusgroup.com. 

Nominations opened for this year’s HCD awards in March, just as COVID-19 cases began to increase in the US. Members of healthcare communities around the world, including Matić-Isautier, began to focus their efforts on safety of the healthcare workers on the frontlines, personal protective equipment (PPE), and efforts to contain the virus. 

Matić-Isautier was awarded Researcher of the Year for her work. As a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Architecture and a graduate researcher with SimTigrate Design Lab, her research aims to bridge the gaps in design as they relate to behavioral choices and health outcomes. Looking at not only healthcare design, but her doctoral thesis is also focused on the bigger picture of design for health, exploring how design affects behavioral choices and how individuals perceive and use health-promoting resources in the Atlanta area.

Over the past several years, Matić has focused on the design of biocontainment units (BCUs), exploring ways in which design can be used to improve staff safety and patient experiences in these spaces.  

Her research on biocontainment unit design dates back to the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak. Matić-Isautier was a part of a multidisciplinary research program Prevention Epicenter of Emory and Atlanta Consortium Hospitals (PEACH)that produced several peer-reviewed journal publications. She co-authored a publication titled, “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units to Reduce Risk During Doffing of High-level Personal Protective Equipment,” that underscores the role of design in supporting staff safety and which was published in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases 

Matić-Isautier led the SimTigrate Design Lab’s 2019 collaboration with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) in the analysis of the layout and organization of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) doffing space in biocontainment units. This research has helped to refine the design of the six BCUs that will go to the new bed tower at CHOA’s, which aims to open in 2025. 

Most recently, Matić-Isautier was the lead author of a white paper titled, “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units: Creating Safer Environments.” The paper is translated into Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, and Farsi and made available online, providing useful information for architects, interior designers, and facility managers– everyone who is looking at ways to create safer and more efficient BCUs.

Lisa Lim, an alumna of the Ph.D. in Architecture program and former researcher with SimTigrate Design Lab and Imagine Lab, was named HDC’s Educator of the Year.

Lim joined the Texas Tech University College of Architecture as an assistant professor in 2018, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and elective courses in design and health. Lim studied evidence-based design at Georgia Tech. Like Matić-Isautier, Lim studied healthy environments for people and understanding how their behaviors and feelings are impacted by physical environments. She now teaches students about this type of health-driven design.

Lim keeps close ties to SimTigrate Design Lab and contributed to “Design Strategies for Biocontainment Units: Creating Safer Environments,” along with Matić-Isautier, Benton Humphreys, Yeinn Oh, and Jennifer Dubose, which was published by Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture in 2020. 

HCD recognized Lim’s accomplishments with her teaching efforts providing real-world and collaborative learning environments to the students. Her research studies healthcare facility design, its effect on teamwork, and its impact on the well-being of healthcare professionals. 

Lim also developed “Visual Power,” that “quantifies interpersonal visual relationships among users of a space, furthering analytical capabilities of the field,” and “Functional Scenario analysis approach” to analyze and evaluate healthcare settings from the users’ perspective. Using this method, researchers are able to quantify spatial features for patients, providers, and family members to improve the comparisons of design options. 

Click here to read more about the 2020 Healthcare Design Awards.

“Studio 2020+ set out to methodically tap into and iteratively cultivate participants’ design imaginations during these unprecedented and incredibly challenging times,” said Kaseman. “Initially calibrated to develop a collective array of architectural typologies tied to projective scenarios within a post-COVID world, the police killing of George Floyd ignited sustained nationwide protests against racism, police brutality, and racial injustice approximately halfway through our five-week long semester.”

“Recalibrating the studio at that point involved a week of attempting to synthesize our raw emotions, while simultaneously building design arsenals and sharpening them towards new directions,” said Kaseman. “With two weeks left, all seventeen students were tasked to initiate and deliver final projects with full freedom to tackle any issue of urgency at hand.”

Master of Architecture students Will Reynolds and Breanna Rhoden decided to examine issues of social injustice in their projects. During their final review, it was suggested by their jurors that Reynolds and Rhoden submit their projects to the Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice competition.

The competition was hosted by Michael Ford, also known as The Hip Hop Architect. Ford uses music to critique the built environment in its past, present, and future. In the summer of 2017, the Georgia Tech School of Architecture brought to campus the Hip Hop Architecture Camp, a one-week camp for middle school students in under-represented communities and connects them with professionals in architecture, urban design, and their communities. Students create architectural models, a Hip Hop Architecture track, and a music video to summarize their design. 

The Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice competition’s call for submissions asked, “How will spaces look in a Just City? A city which has defeated and dismantled racism? What tools will help us get there?”

On Monday, June 22, it was announced that Reynolds received the top prize in the competition and Rhoden was recognized among the top 20 submissions.

The first rule the recent Design Justice competition required that submissions be “inspired by a Hip Hop lyric, track, or album title focused on imagining better communities.”

In his winning entry, Reynolds referenced lyrics from AmeriKKKan Idol by Joey Bada$$, which says, “The scary part, boys and girls/Is most of these stories don’t make it to the news and reach mass consciousness/It is for sure time that we as a people stand up for acknowledgment/And accomplishment of what we call human rights/It is time to rebel, better yet, raise hell.”

“The intent of this project is to facilitate a new form of justice, one that holds those enforcing the law to a new standard of honesty and transparency,” Reynolds said of his project. “This system of drone outposts is dispersed throughout a city. The structures, or outposts, deploy drones when a civilian reports a police stop. Ideally, this report could be vocally activated with a smartphone –‘Hey Siri, the police are here.’ The drone arrives onsite and records the police throughout the interaction. The information is streamed back to the outpost to be monitored by civilians.”

“These drone outposts would act as a facility to store and maintain drones, store, and broadcast information securely, and create a safe space for civilians,” Reynolds added. “This new building typology could be freestanding or occupy existing structures like the space between billboards.”

“I chose the song by Lil Baby called “The Bigger Picture” because it directly speaks to the Black Lives Matter movement currently taking place across the globe during this unprecedented time and how we have to start by inspiring future generations to create a better future through addressing the problems happening now,” said Rhoden about her project, which proposed a new place of refuge, resiliency, and celebration for the community.

“The social and economic effects of the pandemic along with the systemic injustice has and will continue to affect the mental health of the community,” Rhoden continued. “My hope is that this newfound type of architecture will bring solidarity, confidence, and provide some comfort to those putting their lives on the line protesting for racial equality.

Learn more about the Hip Hop + Architecture As Design Justice Competition.

This year, Scott Marble, professor and William H. Harrison Chair of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture and founding partner of Marble Fairbanks Architects, joins the ranks of the AIA College of Fellows.

According to the April 2020 edition of the AIA Newsletter to its members, “Fellowship represents recognition of your significant achievement at this point in your life and it signifies the beginning of a new phase of great potential for your passion for the profession. This is your start for doing more.”

One of the responsibilities put forth by the College of Fellows is that fellows continue to use their time and talents to benefit the future of the profession and to mentor the next generation of professional architects.

“Being elevated to a Fellow is a great honor and it re-energizes me to move to the next level of practice and teaching with a greater focus on impacting the educational and professional processes to help the next generation,” said Marble.

“Through design, teaching, research, and practice, he [Marble] has worked to advance the discipline of architecture,” noted the College of Fellows. “His work merges user-centered design with advanced digital tools and technology to create novel and engaging spaces for people.”

Click here to read the AIA College of Fellows May 2020 Special Issue Newsletter.

The competition, which kicked off on January 13, is designed to simulate a real-world design, planning, and development project.

This year, the competition enters its 18th year. According to the ULI competition website, "The ULI Hines Student Competition is part of the [Urban Land] Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges." 

Six teams from Georgia Tech entered this year's competition. Each team must have five graduate students from at least three different disciplines to be eligible to compete.

The assignment for this year's competition explored the redevelopment of a site in Miami with the Florida East Coast Roast Railway splitting the site into the Wynwood and Edgewater neighborhoods. Student groups imagined that the Tri-Rail would begin providing commuter rail service to downtown Miami in 2021. They were tasked with redeveloping the parcels in the site area to accommodate a station in Midtown Miami, and turning the site into “a thriving, mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood.”

The Georgia Tech teams selected as an honorable mention submitted projects titled, “ETS” and "SPACES."

Team ETS

On Team ETS were Master of Architecture (M.Arch) students, Zachary Brown and Rand Zalzala, Master of City and Regional Planning (MCRP) student Brock Thompson, and Master of Science in Urban Design (MSUD) students, George Doyle and Eleni Kroi. Building Construction and City Planning part-time lecturer John Threadgill was the faculty advisor for this team. Designer II at Portman Architects, T. Coston Dickinson, was the professional advisor for ETS. 

"The importance of the ULI Hines Student Competition for graduate students is the nature of its interdisciplinary emphasis,” said Doyle. “This competition immerses a diverse group of graduate students with unique post-undergraduate backgrounds and skillsets that allow new ideas and the byproducts of these ideas to become tangible solutions to real-life issues needing resolution or mitigation.”

Team SPACES

On Team SPACES were M.Arch students, Conner Smith and Wanli Gao, Master of Real Estate Development student Nicholas Ferran, MCRP student ShuHui “Giselle” Zhen, and MSUD student, Joel Jassu. School of Architecture professor of the practice, Brian Bell was faculty advisor for SPACES. Associate principal at Perkins&Will, Jeff Williams, AICP was the professional advisor for the team. 

“We had 30 students from across the Institute participate this year on six teams,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of the MSUD program. “I know it’s cliché to say they’re all winners, but seriously, it’s pretty awesome what their collective efforts were able to produce and the learning that went on. The fact that two of the six were recognized by the jury for honorable mentions is icing on the cake! We’ve had 12 placements, including four finalists in nine years. I couldn’t be prouder!”

The work from all six teams is currently on exhibition in the Cohen Gallery located on the second floor of the College of Design’s Architecture East Building.

Click here for the ULI Hines Competition press release.

The studio addressed the question, “Do the digitally enabled interactive technologies, current or foreseeable, have the potential to substantially transform building types?”

“It is in the nature of human construction of boundaries that separation and the definition of discrete domains are coupled to conditional reconnection and the creation of interfaces, whether the latter is structured by the arrangement of space itself, or by the arrangement of things in space,” wrote Peponis. “Thus, home defines both the family and the interface between family and social life.”

Click here to download a copy of Home, Architecture, Agency.

Faculty from the Schools of Building Construction, Architecture, and Civil and Environmental Engineering, in addition to faculty participation from the School of Aerospace Engineering, organized the symposium. The primary goal was to define an industry-engaging, comprehensive agenda for future UAS research in the built environment.  

The symposium featured current research within the Georgia Tech College of Design and the Georgia Tech community; along with presentations from visiting faculty members and industry professionals.

"There were representatives from a wide range of disciplines and sectors working collaboratively to address a common challenge and opportunity for the built environment," said Daniel Castro, the chair of the School. "This is a reflection of the direction that we are heading in the School: using technology and innovative methodologies, collaborating with other disciplines, and producing relevant outcomes for the built environment."

Cutting-edge research showcased optimization of flight plan operations, building inspections, and integrating advanced design technology, building typology for multi-system design production, infrared modeling for energy modeling, multi-robot mapping, and more.

Click link to read full story: https://bc.gatech.edu/aec-dream-team-talks-unmanned-aircraft-systems

On Tuesday, March 10, faculty were honored in the Student Center Ballroom as part of Celebrating Teaching Day. Associate professor and director of Stubbins Gallery, Mark Cottle, Professor and director of the Master of Science in Urban Design program, Ellen Dunham-Jones, associate professor and director of the Master of Science in Architecture program, Russell Gentry, and assistant professor and director of the High Performance Building Lab, Tarek Rakha, received the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award.

The award, previously known as the Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award, was created to celebrate faculty members who received exceptional response rates and scores from their Course-Instructor Opinion Survey, which students complete at the end of each semester. Courses taught during the 2019 calendar year were considered for this award.   

Considered a perfect companion to the Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, Assembling the Architect is a useful resource for practitioners as well as architecture students.

“By stoking a broader historical awareness of some of the unresolved tensions that have shaped architecture practice, it is hoped that students of architecture will be inspired by the challenge and potential of redesigning practice itself, to be innovators and agents of change,” said Johnston. “Long-time practitioners may also be surprised to learn about the sources of some of the profession’s most taken for granted assumptions.”

Focusing on the period from 1870 to 1920 when the foundations were being laid for the U.S. architectural profession that we recognize today, this study traces the formation and standardization of the fundamental relationships among architects, owners, and builders, as codified in the American Institute of Architects' very first Handbook of Architectural Practice. It reveals how these archetypal roles have always been fluid, each successfully redefining their own agency with respect to the others in the constantly shifting political economy of building. Johnston’s book hit the shelves in early 2020.

“In the coming decade, architects like other professionals will need to re-conceive altogether how to educate themselves and others, not for the singular profession as they have known it, but for the multitude of roles that increasingly automated practice will demand,” said Johnston. “Where professionalizing efforts of a century ago withdrew the architect from both the site of construction and its field of financial interest, new tools have the potential to thrust architects by whatever names back more organically into the heart of the action, into a multitude of pluralist practices where sharp lines separating project instigation, design, and execution are blurred. The challenge will be to avoid the kinds of professional uniformity that nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalization incurred.”

In order to open a broader discussion around the themes of Johnston’s book, the Georgia Tech School of Architecture will be hosting the Reassembling the Profession Symposium on March 11. Click here to register to attend the symposium.

Click here to learn more about Assembling the Architect.

Urban Systems Design analyzes the ways in which society utilizes Internet of Things-based sharing platforms in the context of smart community dimensions—energy, transport, urban form, and human comfort—and explores how these platforms can be used to improve community health and welfare. 

With recent achievements in research regarding the potential impact of Internet of Things and big data, Urban Systems Design delves into how to identify, structure, measure, and monitor urban sustainability standards and progress. This book reviews the financial, institutional, policy, and technical needs required for a successful implementation in smart cities. 

“Urban design is becoming data-driven. Empowered by new tools and technologies, cities are now far more designable than ever before. The ability to handle how massive data are captured, analyzed, and applied in cities is now critical to addressing problems occurring in places, neighborhoods, and cities. Urban systems design offers an approach to designing new forms of sustainable, resilient, and socially responsible cities in the face of increasing impact of emerging technologies, big data, and urban automation to people, communities, and their placemaking,” said Professor Yang.

Click here to learn more about Urban Systems Design.

The iconic modernist house, designed by Richard Neutra in the 1930s to accommodate his office and family, and rebuilt in the 1960s, is now a museum with a program that invites one artist per year to make installations in the house.

Previous artists in residence were Santiago Borja (2010), Xavier Veilhan (2012), Bryony Roberts (2013), Competing Utopias with the Wende Museum (2014), Luis Callejas (2015), Les Frères Chapuisat (2016), Tu casa es mi casa - Frida Escobedo, Pedro y Juana, Tezontle (2017), and BLESS (2018).

Cottle's installation, THE COST OF MONEY, made from recycled plastic shopping bags and twine, is a meditation on the steep human price capital can exact, particularly from the most vulnerable populations, and at enormous expense to the environment.  

Cottle details his installation, stating:

"It was important that the work engage in a respectful yet vigorous dialogue with the architecture.  In the Neutra VDL House ideals and formal gestures of prewar European modernism find a home in Southern California—including the Arcadian notion of the primitive hut—utopian interiors that are, to all intents and purposes, contiguous with the outdoors, a tamed and regained paradise.

Two visions of modern domesticity co-inhabit:  the original 30s version of the house, and the 60s post-fire iteration.  While the two share an interest in layered and nested spaces, in planarity, and in blurring distinctions between inside and outside, the first version's strict modularity and abstract formal rigor lives in tension with the robust material textures and colors of the second.

I was interested in this tension between abstract and material, between spatial and tectonic, and chose to interact with this doubled vision by suspending three tapestries, each approximately nine feet square, at key moments in the house.

The first tapestry, in the courtyard/garden, adds another lamination, floating just in front of the rough stone veneer. The second, at the stair/bridge, hangs in the gap. The third, in the salon, is a free plane, dividing dining and seating areas.

All three are attached to existing drapery tracks and participate in the spatial logic already established in the house.  The patterns and colors reference the immediate landscape:  paving stones and ground cover, clouds seen through branches, reflections on the water."

The project titled, “ANOTHER LIFE—Sustaining Iceland’s Family Fishing Economy” looked at the impact of climate change on the fishing industry in Iceland. With an economic imbalance spurred by a shrinking supply of fisheries and a growing tourism industry, Song, Lu, and Tibrewala addressed both matters by designing a hotel and a house.

“The hotel can provide basic services such as accommodation and meals for tourists, and during the fishing moratorium, fishermen can provide tourism services such as guides,” the students noted in their project description.

“The project is elegantly narrated with visually impactful diagrams and drawings,” a juror commented. “The structure offers the potential to serve as an iconic architectural element along the shoreline of an everyday neighborhood. This project demonstrates a level of restraint-responding to the existing context and natural landscape while deftly incorporating public spaces.”

The Design and Research (D+R) Studio, co-taught by Michael Gamble, associate professor and director of the Master of Architecture program  and Tarek Rakha, assistant professor of High Performance Buildings, assigned students to tackle the ACSA Zero-Energy Urban Housing Competition proposal.

The design of green infrastructure is a subject near and dear to both Gamble and Rakha’s focus areas. From its beginning, Gamble has been involved in the Kendeda Living Building project, a zero-waste, zero-energy initiative unique to the Southeast.

“Our mission at Georgia Tech is to improve the human condition through progress and service,” said Gamble. “The Living Building and the work coming out of the School of Architecture are clear evidence that Georgia Tech is shaping the future, and our students love it.”

Students from the 2016 Portman Prize Studio actively participated in the Living Building Challenge, which was based on the building's zero-waste building initiative. With topics of sustainability and green infrastructure deeply embedded in the School of Architecture, Gamble and Rakha saw this competition as an opportunity to directly address what they were already teaching in their courses.

“Students in the High Performance Building Master of Science in Architecture program employ state-of-the-art environmental performance simulation tools to inform their partners in architectural design,” said Rakha. “The design and performance integration happen through the use of advanced, research-based frameworks as experiential learning methods that enhance energy and comfort in built environment design.”

In addition to Song, Lu, and Tibrewala winning first place, Solangely Rivera Hernandez (’19), Warren Campbell (’19), and Lu received an honorable mention for their submission “Recovery Assemblies: Rapid Deployable Housing Post-Disaster Events.”

Their project looked at the current protocols provided by disaster relief organizations as people are displaced following floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., and created prototypical, temporary, versatile modules that could be adapted to the needs of the user.

Click here to read more about our winners.  

More than half of all U.S. commercial buildings were built before 1970 and are inefficient relative to newer buildings. To address the inefficiency of this older stock, retrofit programs rely on on-site auditing to collect information about buildings’ envelope, lighting, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems on physics-based, whole-building energy modeling to identify and diagnose specific inefficiencies in these systems and to design and optimize energy-efficiency measure packages that address them.

Envelopes and windows account for over 50% of energy loads in buildings, but collecting detailed and actionable information about them is challenging. A primary challenge is the difficulty in accessing building exteriors above the first or second story. Using humans to perform this inspection is time-consuming, costly, dangerous, and error prone.

The research team is addressing this challenge in a three-year project called Aerial Intelligence for Retrofit Building Energy Modeling (AirBEM). AirBEM will complement human auditing of building interiors with the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) equipped with infrared sensors and onboard processors to audit the exterior envelope. The drones will use Computer Vision (CV) techniques to detect both materials and heat transfer anomalies which suggest construction defects such as air leaks.

“The aspiration for this work is to profoundly inform building retrofit design by radically enhancing the methods and modes of envelope audits,” said Tarek Rakha, who serves as Principle Investigator (PI) for the project. “We want to allow auditors to move past a small number of single-frame images for inspection; we want to enable retrofits to address specific building envelope issues, and want to develop 3D models that designers can interact with when developing retrofit plans.” 

Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D) will be led by Georgia Tech as the prime recipient with academic partners including, associate professor Senem Velipasalar and associate professor Ed Bogucz from the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University, and professor John Fernández from the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Sandeep Ahuja from Pattern R+D software developers will serve as industry partner. RD&D conducted with DOE funding will advance AirBEM from a preliminary proof-of-concept to develop a transformational cyber-physical system that automates diagnostic capabilities of the UAV platform. 

In fact, The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design isn’t really sustainable at all; more accurately, the newest building on the Atlanta campus is regenerative. And it has reimagined from the ground up what a campus building can be.

“The time for doing less harm is gone,” said Shan Arora, director of The Kendeda Building. “We need to have buildings that provide more than they take.”

That broad guiding principle has produced a building that will, each year, generate more on-site electricity than it consumes and collect and harvest more water than it uses. During construction, the building diverted more waste from landfills than it sent to them.

“The Kendeda Building is an incredible and beautiful example of sustainable design, integration with nature, human inclusion and well-being. It is the most sustainable building of its kind in the Southeast,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Thanks to our partnership with the Kendeda Fund, it will inspire architects, civil engineers, business and policy leaders for generations to come.”

In 2015, The Kendeda Fund committed $25 million for Georgia Tech to design and build a living building on campus in an effort prove a regenerative building was practical even in the Southeast’s heat and humidity. An additional $5 million will support programming activities once the building is certified.

The Kendeda Building is the first academic and research building in the Southeast designed to be certified as a living building by the International Living Future Institute. Over the next 12 months, it will have to prove its bona fides to earn Living Building Challenge 3.1 certification, delivering on its promise to be self-sufficient, healthy, and beautiful while connecting people to light, air, food, nature, and community.

“The dedication of The Kendeda Building represents the culmination of many years of planning and partnership. We are humbled to see the vision come to life, and we hope it can be a model for change across the Southeast,” said Dena Kimball, executive director of The Kendeda Fund. “But the official opening of the building is the starting point, not the finish line. Now the real work begins, as Georgia Tech embraces the goals of the Living Building Challenge and demonstrates what’s required to operate a building that gives more than it takes and creates a positive impact on the human and natural systems that surround it.”

One of the first steps in that effort is getting the on-site water treatment system certified by state environmental regulators. It will be the first rainwater-to-drinking-water system in a commercial building in this part of the country. Arora said that means the project is breaking more new ground for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

“We are teaching and learning together, the regulator and the regulated,” he said.

The Kendeda Building will host several events in the fall and then open fully in the spring for classes, when it becomes a living, learning laboratory for education and research.

“Really, the best is yet to come. Our goal is to host as many large and required courses from across campus to give our students access to a building that actually teaches us all something,” said Michael Gamble, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. “It’s not just for those students interested in sustainability as a career. For example, next semester, calculus will be taught in The Kendeda Building.”

Gamble helped lead efforts to embed the concepts of the Living Building Challenge more broadly in the Georgia Tech curriculum, including a series of pilot projects that helped explore the challenge’s requirements. Gamble also led a series of architecture design studios focused on mass timber technology like that used in the building.

“The pilot project program should be a part of every capital project on campus — we’ve learned more and made more connections than we ever thought we would,” Gamble said.

Likewise, Arora said the project team — general contractor Skanska and architects Lord Aeck Sargent and The Miller Hull Partnership — found new sources of materials and created ways of working that now will ripple out to other projects.

“Once you learn how to build and operate a living building, you can’t unlearn it,” Arora said. “Through this process, we’re creating the local supply chain, the workforce, and the best practices for other buildings in the region to use living building elements.”

Master of Architecture (M.Arch) student, Clay Kiningham, won in the categories of Miscellaneous Architecture, Mixed Use Architecture, and Green Architecture with his project Fourth and Foundry–Timber Housing Towers in South Boston. This project serves as a prototype for the future of sustainable timber cities. In the Spring 2019 semester, Kiningham’s project also received the Portman Studio Prize, a competition studio supported by Portman Architects.

Emily Wirt (M.Arch ’19) also placed in the Mixed Use Architecture category. Wirt’s project titled, “Pockets” was designed during her final Design + Research studio. “Pockets are surprising gathering spaces created through simple means,” aaid Wirt. “Moments of exception are embedded within a dense mixed-use building grid, raveling through channels of light, sound, and air.”

Also among the winners from Georgia Tech, Yevgenia (Jane) Ilyasova (Bachelor of Science in Architecture ’19) received an award in the landscape architecture category for Installations and Structures. Ilyasova’s project, “Theater of the Landscape” created a site on Angel Island that would memorialize Asian immigration from around 1890, when they were tragically kept in barracks as they awaited citizenship before being turned away. The new sanctuary would highlight its past while providing a refuge for new and future citizens. Ilyasova is currently pursuing her Master of Architecture degree at Princeton University.

Rachel Cloyd (M.Arch ’19) won in the Small Architecture category with her project titled, “Transform.” Cloyd’s project was designed in Georgia Tech’s Thomas W. Ventulett Chair, Débora Mesa’s Design and Research studio in the Fall 2018 semester, which challenged students to look at the Atlanta Beltline and prototype architectures that influence the debate about contemporary urban values and spaces. Cloyd’s project looked how transportation infrastructure could fulfill another purpose.

M.Arch student, Michael Koliner, also won in the Small Architecture category as well as in the Miscellaneous Architecture category with his Inflatable Tensegrity Structures project. Koliner worked alongside Georgia Tech’s first Ventulett NEXT Fellow, Jonathan Dessi-Olive, part-time lecturer and senior principal with Uzun+Case, Jim Case, and structural engineer with Uzun+Case, Vinay Teja Meda. In early October 2019, this project presented at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Conference in Barcelona, Spain with a pavilion-scale inflatable-tensegrity-structure. 

B.S. in Architecture senior, Jamieson Pye, received an honorable mention in Landscape Architecture in the Installation and Structures category. Pye said that his project was inspired by work from Ensamble Studio. Pye’s project titled, “Incision…a journey through space and time” represents a story of rediscovery by the using discarded, excavated remains of natural terrain to create a new island.

Check out the winning student projects here.

“We have found an ever-expanding field for exploration and invention in architecture—one where every built work is just the beginning of the next project to come, in constant evolution and full of creative uncertainties,” Said Mesa and García-Abril in response to the award. “One that has the enormous potential to transcend our own actions and become part of bigger ideas, bigger endeavors and greater communities. The RIBA Charles Jencks Award has a challenging mission and a humbling list of recipients, so winning it is as surprising as encouraging. We receive it with great happiness and gratitude, eager to do much more and much better.”

“Débora Mesa and Antón Garcia-Abril are bold in their work, which explores the powerful combination of placemaking, functionality, refinement and beauty, in both urban and rural areas,” said David Gloster, Chair of the RIBA Charles Jencks Award judging panel and RIBA Director of Education. “Ensamble Studio is a highly collaborative practice built on the personal, professional and academic strengths of its staff and is a great example of using creative thinking to navigate architectural challenges.”

Learn more about Ensamble Studio and the 2019 RIBA Charles Jencks Award here.

Willkens joined the School of Architecture at the beginning of the fall 2019 semester. Willkens is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries.

Willkens will present a lecture titled, “Architects Abroad: Seeing, Drawing, and Traveling” at the Center for Architecture located at 536 LaGuardia Place in New York City.  Willkens was the 2007 Soane Fellow. Her lecture will discuss the importance of travel as part of an architect’s educational background, particularly when exploring the nature and scope of Soane’s Grand Tour and Parisian excursions.

Doors open at 6pm, and lecture will begin at 6:30pm EST. Learn more about Willkens’ lecture here.

Under the OPT (Optional Practical Training) program, international students who graduate from colleges and universities in the United States are able to remain in the country and receive training through work experience for up to 12 months. Students who graduate from a designated STEM degree program can remain for an additional 24 months on the F-1 STEM OPT extension. 

“This designation helps capture the value of the integration of so many different technological, social, and ecological aspects of our urban design program,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the MSUD program. 

Georgia Tech has been a leader in urban design education since 1969. In addition to the MSUD, housed in the School of Architecture, students can specialize in urban design in the Master of City and Regional Planning (MCRP) degree or can pursue the M.Arch/MCRP dual degree. All three emphasize a culture of collaboration linking requisite knowledge and expertise across fields of architecture, planning, landscape, and engineering to propose integrated and implementable solutions to the design of urban areas.

The MSUD is the most studio-centric of the three programs with a specific focus on preparing students to produce detailed drawings integrating the design of public infrastructure, public spaces and the subdivision of private land. The MSUD is also distinguished by its exclusive focus on redeveloping our least sustainable areas into more resilient, more equitable, and more prosperous places.

We invite you to Watch the 2019 MSUD Virtual Open House. Applications are open now and the deadline to apply is January 15, 2019. 

Associate professor, W. Jude LeBlanc recalled his feelings that day. “I was alerted to the fire by a text from Michael Gamble, a colleague who directs the summer foreign study programs, Modern Architecture/Modern Cities,” said LeBlanc. “I have to admit it was difficult for me to look at the video images. I would move from article to article on the web, and it took a while before I could bear to look at the videos that showed the falling spire, etc. “

LeBlanc's unique skillset includes the design of furniture and objects; architecture, interior design and installations; and planning, infrastructure and urban design, which all contribute to his interesting point of view not only to that of the design of Notre-Dame, but also to his contributions as a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture. This summer, LeBlanc traveled to France to lead the Paris portion of the Modern Architecture and Modern City international education program. 

What are your thoughts on the modern designs that are being proposed for the restoration of Notre-Dame?

President Macron’s proposal for an architectural design competition that would result in an edifice “more beautiful than before” should give one pause.  Nonetheless, the call for a competition to potentially improve or alter Notre Dame serves several functions.  

It provides a means to understand and perhaps reassess the past, to consider our best potential futures, and to hopefully better understand the relationship between the two.  There are many examples in which culturally significant historical structures have been successfully altered by contemporary transformations—The Louvre (I.  M. Pie) and the Reichstag (Norman Foster), for example. Each case is different. 

The Cathedral is included in a large World Heritage Site called “Pairs, Banks of the Seine”. My own opinion is that this monument should be restored to its near exact state before the fire. 

This was true for the Campanile of St. Mark’s Square in Venice and even more so here.  The stone vaults of the ceiling must be repaired, and the spire and roof should be restored.

Specifically, what are some of Notre-Dame's significant features and why should they be preserved?

The stone vaulted ceiling. At least one current proposal suggests that the vault should remain open as a skylight, in part to commemorate the inferno.  The original building, at great expenditure, made light filled walls bound together by vaulting and flying buttresses.  Opening a vault to the sky would have the undesirable and unacceptable effect of altering the fundamental schema of the section and its spatial implications. 

The spire.  According to Professor Emeritus Rob Craig, the spire was as important as any other element to the essential quality of the Gothic attitude. Many more were planned throughout the cathedrals of France than were ultimately realized.  This is because they obviously were the last elements to be built and they would have required immense effort. It was correct that Violet le Duc replaced the spire to Notre Dame in 1844, after the original had been removed in 1756 for structural fatigue. 

The hidden structure of the spire transfers load to the corners of the crossing. Violet le Duc became an expert on medieval timber construction before undertaking this project.  In the intervening years, much of his work has acquired an historical aura in its own right--especially the spire.  Luckily, the sixteen bronze statues had been removed at the time of the calamitous fire.

The roof.  The roof form is an important visual element in the silhouette of Notre Dame and therefore of the skyline of Île de la Cité.  Its authentic reconstruction is essential to a proper restoration.  One exception should be considered.  The hidden structure between the vaults and the roof was made of so much old growth timber it was referred to as “la forêt”, the forest.  Replacement of this amount of timber, even if possible, would represent an avoidable environmental loss.

What is the significance of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in relation to classic and modern architecture?

Notre-Dame is considered one of the great examples of French Gothic Architecture. Construction of the cathedral began in 1160 and was largely complete by 1260.  First called the “French Style,” the Gothic style first appeared in the early 12th c. at the Basilica of Saint-Denise. The main characteristic of Gothic design is its emphasis on the vertical made possible by novel applications of the ribbed vault and the pointed arch, along with the innovation of the flying buttress.

The Gothic style would have lasting effects that altered future styles. Michael Dennis argues that the Renaissance and Baroque facades of France are distinct from Italy in recurring visual and spatial verticality.  Structural expressionism, a major strain in modernist theory and practice, had the Gothic and neo-Gothic precedent behind it.

For example, Violet le Duc proposed novel uses of iron in design in the late 1800s. Violet le Duc was the architect in charge of the 19thcentury renovation of Notre Dame and the person responsible for restoring the fleche, or spire, that had been destroyed. He argued, against the neo-classical preference of the time, that the Gothic style was superior, especially in this context. 

What is another example of a notable building’s collapse. How was it restored?

The Notre-Dame fire is reminiscent of another historic building calamity-the collapse of the St. Mark’s campanile in Venice.  The campanile was one of several prominent buildings—the Dodges’ Palace, the Sansovino library and the St. Mark Cathedral—that together made up the main square of the city.

A tower had stood on this location in Venice since the 14th century and took its final essential form in 1513.  After damage over the years, especially due to lighting strikes, the tower was outfitted with a lightning rod in the 18th century.  Nonetheless, in July of 1902, the tower collapsed completely. As in Paris, not a single human life was taken. That very evening, the decision was made to rebuild the tower exactly as it was before the collapse.

The Notre-Dame Cathedral is a monument onto itself, a supreme exemplar of a style of building which has come to signify both Paris and France.  Happily, it appears that both the will and the means exist to restore the cathedral in Paris.

The building is important in art history and in the popular imagination. President Macron’s promise that the cathedral be fully restored is laudable, despite controversies. For example, I would hope that aesthetics would not be pitted against social equity.  

In anticipation of season three of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, which is poised to emphasize the mall culture of the 1980s, Dreyfuss reached out to Dunham-Jones, an expert in dying malls and how to retrofit them for future use.

Dunham-Jones is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, which explores retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks as they provide healthier and more sustainable places for their communities.

“Newspapers like to jump to the headline that it’s online shopping, but that’s more like the nail in the coffin, than it really is the beginning. The decline of the malls really starts in the 90s mostly because we built so many of them that they started to cannibalize each other.” Dunham-Jones says about the decline of shopping malls. However, Dunham-Jones says that she is most interested in when people are looking at the death of these properties as opportunities to help a 20^th century suburb address 21^st century problems.

Watch Dunham-Jones’ interview with WIRED here.

The University of Thessaly was founded in 1984, and the Department of Architecture was founded in 1999 and celebrated its 30 year anniversary.

During the period 1992-2005 Peponis also worked as a part time professor at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he helped initiate the first post-professional research-based Master of Science degree in architecture. He was also invited to offer lectures at the Universities of Patras and Thessaly.

At the University of Thessaly, he helped organize workshops and coordinate conferences. He was on the organizing committee for the conference on Representation and Thought in Architecture that was run  by professors Trova, Manolidis and Papaconstantinou in 2005, and brought together 250 attendees from all Schools of Architecture in Greece and several schools in Europe and the USA, including Georgia Tech, leading to a major book on the subject. Peponis’s book Chorographies: the architectural construction of meaning, written in Greek, has been widely included in reading lists in all Schools of Architecture in Greece since its publication in 1997.

“The development of new ideas, theories and methods always involves intense and persistent face-to-face communication with like-minded people.,” said Peponis. “Some of the people I have been comparing notes with over the years work at the University of Thessaly. I like to think that this recognition reflects not only on my own work but also on the common intellectual ethos that propels fundamental advances in architecture as a discipline. It is also deeply rewarding to be recognized in one’s home country.”

The award ceremony took place on the same day as the Georgia Tech School of Architecture End of Year Show. The End of Year Show gives students an opportunity to showcase their work for an audience of their peers, faculty, family, friends, alumni, and local practitioners. This exhibition is hosted in the Hinman Research Building and the Hinman Courtyard, which underwent a new installation in the fall of 2018.

Design/Build Workshop Project Earns Excellence Award

So it came as no surprise to the School when we learned that the Hinman Courtyard Installation received an excellence award in the student project category. This project took place over three semesters as part of a Design/Build workshop that consisted of multidisciplinary teams who prototyped, detailed, fabricated, and constructed three new installations, which are now in use in the Courtyard. The installation elements include a pavilion, a layered steel veneer wall, and stair seating.

Portman Prize Studio Project Receives Honor

The recognition of our student work did not stop with the Hinman Courtyard. A team comprised of Marco Ancheita, Emily Wirt, and Stephanie Wright received a merit award for their project, “Rigid + Fluid,” which was created for their Spring 2018 Portman Prize Studio taught by Jen Pindyck. This project proposes a Center for Ecological Interpretation and Land Use History at Amicalola Falls.

BLDGS Named AIA Georgia Firm of the Year

One of the strengths of the School of Architecture is that we have faculty who are actively practicing in their fields.

“BLDGS is a recognized firm of local, regional, and national commendation. The Atlanta-based firm has set a precedent for other firms large and small in its design philosophy of individualized solutions and the importance of a contemporary and public focused perspective on design and the built environment,” notes the award announcement by AIA Georgia.

“Equally passionate about both education and architecture, founding principals, David Yocum, and Brian Bell, also serve as professors of the practice at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Architecture where they have been able to imbue their dedicated and enlightened view of architecture and environmental impact. BLDGS has elevated the public’s conception of meaningful design and their multi-faceted work shows their belief in architecture as a “community asset.” Their work in both architecture and with the next generation of architects is recognized, celebrated and to be commended and recognized with the 2019 AIA Georgia Firm of the Year Award."

Click here to read the press release for this year’s AIA Georgia Design and Honor Awards.

“Our interdisciplinary design studios are based in structured teamwork that includes students from other disciplines on campus,” said Julie Kim, Associate Professor, Associate Chair, and Director of Undergraduate Program in the School of Architecture. “This is central to our curriculum, emphasizing design as a creative pursuit that requires integrated knowledge from various disciplines. With Architecture participating in the Capstone Design Expo, we have an opportunity to share the innovative and collaborative work our students produce to an audience that includes faculty, industry professionals, and students across the Institute.” 

Each semester, architecture students are required to take a studio as part of their curriculum. Juniors and seniors are organized into the Vertical Studio, and this year, 19 teams represented the School of Architecture at the Expo. 

“Our studios this semester took on the challenges of proposing satellite atria for collaborative learning spaces; interrogating maintenance and repair of structures as they age; designing for disaster, while also developing innovative systems in concrete; and considering global culture and community,” said Kim. “By participating in the Expo, our students engage in a larger conversation with their peers across the Institute. It is a reciprocal situation. Others gain awareness of the range of complex issues our students take on just as our own students see how their peers tackle allied concerns. The platform is, then, set for possible future collaborations.”

“Participating was an exciting experience!,” said Jane Ilyasova (Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Architecture, ’19). “Seeing the range of work produced by other Colleges was eye-opening and made me feel proud to be a part of a community of students that work towards making a positive impact through innovation.”

“Typically, a lot of students and staff from other school departments are unaware of what we do as Architecture majors,” added Tia Calhoun, rising senior in the B.S. in Architecture program. “By participating in Capstone, we are able to give the school of Architecture the exposure and recognition  it deserves.”

Architecture is one of the categories in the Spring Capstone Design Expo. This year, Noah Sannes (B.S. in Architecture, ’19) and Christopher Tromp (B.S. in Architecture, ’19) took home the architecture prize for their project titled, “Coalescence.” Coalescence is a hypothetical proposal for a community recreation center within the city of Atlanta. The project is part of the ACSA Built-to-Last: Resilience Design Challenge, a competition focused on innovations in concrete construction.

“Our project specifically was put forth through the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and sponsored by the Portland Cement Company,” said Tromp. “It pushed for innovations in concrete, which we implemented in our project through innovative uses of existing materials and pushing for a new development of the material that could filter water. Our project had to take into account many different factors from understanding the socio-cultural demographics of the site, innovations in concrete, water management, social resilience, environmental resilience, disaster relief functions and accommodations, and accessibility for the neighborhood and then be presented in a architecturally coherent and aesthetically rich manner.”

“I believe that it is important for us architecture students to showcase our design work to a wide audience,” said Sannes. “At the Senior Design Capstone, I have had the opportunity to discuss sustainability and material innovations with professionals and academics across many fields. I have had the opportunity to receive crucial career advice from visiting architects, as well. My favorite part of Capstone is sharing with others about what architects do - we invent, create, make, model, and visualize!”

“It’s a story I don’t think is my own story, I think it’s a story that is shared by so many champions that have come along the way.”

In the beginning of the 2018 fall semester, Julie Kim, Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, assigned an article to her Vertical Studio class by Juhani Pallasmaa titled, “Light, Silence, and Spirituality in Architecture and Art.”

Tran was inspired by the article as she began work on her project for the semester. In “’Immersion…,’” Tran says, “a sanctuary arises from darkness, light, and human emotions.”

The 2018 competition, titled “A Sanctuary,” asked students to explore the site of Angel Island, located in the San Francisco Bay, which was formerly a home to the West Coast Immigrant station. In contrast to Ellis Island, immigrants were housed in barracks on the island and suffered from difficult living conditions. The station closed in 1940, and as the competition overview notes, “…the island was seen as a mechanism to exile immigrants in geo-political limbo – there was never a Statue of Liberty welcoming them.” The competition proposed that participants design a new arrival center that would provide a welcoming place of sanctuary to new immigrants.

“’Immersion…’ spawned from a series of abstract charcoal drawings that crafted different spatial experiences,” Tran said as she described her project. “I thought of light and of darkness as materials of space when I drew the charcoal drawings. They were my way of answering the question: “Where does the building disintegrate and we are only left with emotions that light and silence must offer?” From these charcoal studies, I found four essential dimensions that the interplays of darkness and light offer. The four dimensions are of the past, of the future, of time, and of self.  I perceived these dimensions to be different worlds for people to immerse into and lose sight of reality—a haven for the mind, body, and soul.”

Click here to view Tran’s merit award-winning project.

The symposium will feature leading researchers and designers – alumni trained at the SimTigrate Design Lab in the College of Design, as well as current researchers and students – and will look at the ways design and the design process can transform healthcare.

The symposium, titled Designing the Future of Healthcare: Linking Problem, Evidence, and Transformation, will feature a keynote from SimTigrate Director and School of Architecture Professor Craig Zimring.

He expects the symposium “will identify emerging problems facing healthcare. In the late 20^th century we realized the harms we do to patients inadvertently through errors and infections. That, combined with the opportunities to build tens of billions of dollars in healthcare facilities, led to evidence showing that design can address problems in safety and errors. The field of evidence-based design has helped improve the experience of millions of patients worldwide by supporting safer, quieter, light-filled, better organized facilities.”

The symposium also will show how healthcare design research and innovative design of primary and in-patient care can help healthcare organizations address their biggest pressures, which include cost and reimbursement, patient and staff safety, patient experience, and chronic disease.

The result will be a view of emerging themes in healthcare design and research and a map of how researchers and designers can be full partners in transformation, Zimring said.

Looking Toward the Future

He said healthcare systems are also facing the problem of the coming tsunami of chronic diseases, as care providers deal with things like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and depression.

Zimring said the issue now is to identify the problems that are addressable through physical design and technology. Let’s look at evidence and research that our alumni and lab have done that shows that design can address problems of safety, efficiencies, staff processes, and more, he said.

Looking ahead, Zimring said that for the future of healthcare we must create a system which is more efficient, and which keeps people well rather than just curing them when they are sick.

The way forward, he said, is to bring together built environment technology and improvements in process and access in some integrated way, making the built environment part of the fundamental tool kit in providing health care.

Alumni Bring Their Expertise

Alumni in academia and industry will join current SimTigrate students and researchers. Many continue to do research at their universities, lead research centers of their own, and work with researchers in industry.

One of the returning alumni is Joshua Crews (M.Arch 2011), a senior architect and healthcare team leader at Nelson, an architecture firm with an office in Atlanta.

He is expected to talk about the role of research in the design process, and show how researchers and industry work together.

He and his firm are working with Georgia Tech and Emory University to create a facility to support a living laboratory for those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. With little existing evidence to draw from, his work will rely on research to inform design decisions, program activities, and more. He will give some insight into the process.

Crews also presents and continues to do research with Jennifer DuBose, SimTigrate associate director.

DuBose and SimTigrate researchers have built a Lighting User Experience or L(ux) Lab with funding from the Pacific Northwest National Lab and fully tunable white lights donated by Signify.

New developments in lighting technology and discoveries about how light impacts the human brain have led to many opportunities to enhance the experience in healthcare environments. Building on literature reviews with the help of SimTigrate alumni and current students, the lab has designed a series of lighting experiments to evaluate the performance, acceptability and impact on behavior of different lighting conditions with a range of spectral properties and intensities.

The findings from the completed experiments on the acceptability of lighting for nursing tasks will be shared.

The presentation also will include a first look at the plans for testing the use of lighting to enhance cognitive performance in the collaboration between Emory and Georgia Tech in the Mild Cognitive Impairment Empowerment Center in Executive Park in Northeast Atlanta.

Zimring notes that one advantage of working with industry is it gives them the chance to implement their work quickly into the real world.

In bringing back former students, Zimring said one idea was to highlight the achievements of Georgia Tech in the area of healthcare design research and of the many former students around the country.

SimTigrate has helped nurture some of the most effective people in the field and they in turn are training students and engaging the world. “We are celebrating our impact,” he said.

Returning alumni and their current places of employment are:

• Sheila Bosch, Ph.D. Arch 2004, University of Florida
• Hui Cai, Ph.D. Arch 2012, University of Kansas
• Josh Crews, M.Arch 2011, Nelson Architects
• Saif Haq, Ph.D. Arch 2001, Texas Tech University
• Anjali Joseph, Ph.D. Arch 2006, Clemson University
• Lisa Lim, Ph.D. Arch 2018, Texas Tech University
• Lorissa MacAllister, Ph.D. Arch 2015, Enviah
• Michelle Ossmann, Ph.D. Arch 2016, Steelcase
• Debajyoti Pati, Ph.D. Arch 2005, Texas Tech University

Current researchers and students are:

• Jennifer DuBose, Associate Director of the SimTigrate Design Lab
• Zorana Matic, Graduate research assistant at SimTigrate and Ph.D. student
• Raha Rastegar, Graduate research assistant at SimTigrate and Ph.D. student
• Craig Zimring, Director of the SimTigrate Design Lab

This symposium is supported by a grant from the College of Design’s Associate Dean for Research, Nancey Green Leigh.

Register here for the symposium.

Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design program, brings together a pair of leading experts to address specific challenges including equity, money, social capital, climate change, outdated infrastructure, and disruptive technologies. The brief videos feature a presentation by one of the speakers, while the extended podcasts capture the conversation between the two experts. Podcasts and videos can be accessed on iTunes, YouTube and other popular platforms as well as through the Redesigning Cities website. Follow the series on Twitter @RedesignCities.

The series provides insights and up-to-date thinking about the future of cities. In Episode One, Redesigning Cities with Autonomous Vehicles, Jeff Tumlin of Nelson Nygaard and Harriet Tregoning of New Urban Mobilities (NUMO) point out how autonomy does not change everything that good designers are already doing to make cities more multi-modal. In a following episode, Redesigning Cities for the Collaborative Economy, Gabe Klein described how he was able to quickly install bike lanes as Transportation Commissioner for Washington DC and Chicago. However, Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, warned that adding bike lanes and transit alone will not  ward off climate change. The speed of change through collaborative platforms such as AirBnb and Lyft hold the only solution to systemic issues like climate change since they more easily capitalize on excess capacity and rapid scaling-up.

In Episode Two, June Williamson of The City College of New York and Allison Arieff of SPUR and author of The New York Times By Design column pointed out that efforts to capture excess capacity must include attention to retrofitting suburbia, too. Noted planner Peter Calthorpe distinguished three types of sprawl around the globe as the principal targets in his discussion of Retrofitting Cities Against Climate Change with Rob Kunzig, senior editor at National Geographic. The concept of the necessity of different solutions for different places was both reinforced and disputed in Episode Three’s fascinating comparison of Detroit and New York City’s efforts to redesign urban parks as social infrastructure by Maurice Cox, Planning Commissioner of Detroit, and Mitchell Silver, Parks and Recreation Commissioner of New York.

Still forthcoming is Episode Six, Gentrification without Displacement? with Joseph P. Riley and Jess Zimbabwe. This final lecture of the series’ inaugural season will take place on Wednesday, April 24 at the Historic Academy of Medicine beginning at 6 p.m.

Dunham-Jones says “It’s been fascinating to listen to two experts have informed, speculative, and candid conversations on such a wide variety of urban topics. I’m delighted that thanks to the Speedwell Foundation we can share the videos and podcasts with the world. It’s time for all of us to think more about redesigning cities.”

SimAUD is a highly selective annual conference supported by the Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  The conference returns to the United States this year for its 10-year anniversary. Previously, the conference was held in Delft, the Netherlands (2018), Toronto, Canada (2017) and London, United Kingdom (2016). Georgia Tech was selected this year because of the College of Design’s leadership in scholarship and education in design technology. The conference is organized by the Georgia Tech School of Architecture.

This year the program includes four keynote presentations, 11 sessions that showcase 40 single-track, peer-reviewed publications, 8 pre-conference workshops, two professional panels and engaging social events at Georgia Tech and in Atlanta. The conference will also feature a symposium-wide simulation game that will engage participants throughout the three days.

“SimAUD 2019 is going to be a universal celebration of a phenomenal international community of simulation scholars, coming together to discuss state-of-the-art design technology in a truly convergent format,” says SimAUD2019 Program Chair, Tarek Rakha, assistant professor of architecture and high performance buildings in the School of Architecture. “Georgia Tech is both thrilled and honored to host and develop the program for the decennial celebration of this event coming back to the United States, where 12 faculty across Tech’s campus will serve as session chairs and moderators, focusing on a variety of topics ranging from climate modeling to the simulation of people in the built environment. We look forward to welcoming colleagues from all around the world who will disseminate their latest advances in research and innovations for better built environment futures through the lenses of design technology”

“Contemporary architecture practice continuously develops a common digital language to integrate building industry frameworks.” says Scott Marble, Chair of Georgia Tech School of Architecture. “SimAUD 2019 will present critical topics being explored in top academic research centers and architectural practices from around the world. Design technologies have great potential to transform practice in new and innovative ways and through events like this, impactful international synergies are sure to be built to advance this transformation.

“Georgia Tech’s College of Design sets an ideal stage for the 10-year anniversary of SimAUD, leveraging Tech’s technological synergies, along with the College’s strengths in design, planning and creativity.” says Nancey Green Leigh, College of Design Associate Dean of Research. “By bringing together remarkable and established researchers and practitioners in urban planning and design, architecture and building science, visualization and construction, as well as software development, SimAUD 2019, offers promising opportunities for collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship that to advance Tech’s research agenda.”

“The faculty and students at the Georgia Tech College of Design focus on integrating design and technology. We have developed advanced simulation and visualization models at the building, neighborhood, and city-scale,” said College of Design Dean Stephen P. French. “We are thrilled to host SimAUD and look forward to working with you to push the boundaries of simulation research. Welcome to Georgia Tech!”

The conference runs from Sunday, April 7 through Tuesday, April 9. All sessions are scheduled to take place in the John and Joyce Caddell Building’s Flex Space. The conference offers a platform to unite researchers and practitioners in the fields of architecture, urban design, urban planning, building science, and data science. SimAUD 2019 will feature a range of topics related to simulation with a special emphasis on methods that bridge disciplinary gaps between design, construction, operations, resource management, human behavior, and performance analytics across building and urban scales.

Follow this link to register for SimAUD 2019.

About the Georgia Tech School of Architecture

Georgia Tech School of Architecture’s mission is to instill students with a life-long curiosity for the social and cultural meaning of the built environment and a passion to be part of improving the future. The School offers six distinct degree programs that each address the wide spectrum of design, technology, and social and cultural components of the architecture profession. The programs include a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Master of Architecture, a Master of Science in Architecture, a Master of Science in Urban Design, a dual Master of Architecture and Master of City and Regional Planning, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is a top-ranked public university and one of the leading research institutions in the U.S.A. Georgia Tech provides a technologically focused education to more than 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students in fields ranging from engineering, computing, and sciences, to business, design, and liberal arts.

This year, the competition enters its 17th year. According to the ULI competition website, "The ULI Hines Student Competition is part of the [Urban Land] Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges." 

Seven teams from Georgia Tech entered this year's competition. Each team must have five graduate students from at least three different disciplines to be eligible to compete.

The assignment for this year's competition explored the redevelopment of a site in Cincinnati comprising portions of a highway, the central business district, and the central riverfront along the Ohio River. Student groups took a deep dive into the potential to bridge the highway and combine it with adjacent properties, ultimately to connect both areas to create a sustainable, pedestrian-focused, mixed-use neighborhood.

The competition, which kicked off on January 14, is designed to simulate a real world design, planning, and development project.  This year's assignment focused on Cincinnati’s vision for connecting the central riverfront entertainment district.

The Georgia Tech team selected as an honorable mention submitted a project titled, "Looping the Banks." Conner Smith, Master of Architecture student, served as team leader for Looping the Banks. Also on the team were Master of Architecture student, Wanli Gao, Master of Real Estate Development student, Bryan Katz, and Master of Science in Urban Design students, Jingxin Xu and Siqi Li. School of Architecture professor and director of the Urban Design program, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and School of Architecture professor of the practice, Brian Bell were faculty advisors for this team. Director of the Master of Real Estate Development for the School of Building Construction, Rick Porter, and associate principal at Perkins+Will, Atlanta, Cassie Branum were professional advisors for Looping the Banks. 

According to the group's project proposal, Looping the Banks aims to complete, "a vibrant loop around the Banks riverfront park" while also, "forming a connection between the Central Business District and the Ohio River." 

“I’m really proud of them," Dunham-Jones said. "I love seeing the students work together and produce so much work with people they’ve never really met before. It’s extraordinary, really.”

The work from all seven teams is currently on exhibition in the Cohen Gallery located on the second floor of the College of Design’s Architecture East Building.

Click here for the ULI Hines Competition press release. 

We talked with Leigh ahead of the forum to learn more about the complexity of urban automation.

To start, what are we referring to when we say “urban automation”? Can you give a couple of examples?

There is no one definition of urban automation. Loosely it refers to hardware and software developments that substitute for previous mechanical and human-operated physical or decision-making systems to regulate and service urban functions. These developments are largely enabled by advances in information and communication technologies.

Some present examples include, drones, robots, and sensors. Others will evolve in the future.

How does the topic of urban automation fit in with research at the College of Design?

In planning, it can potentially be used to create smart cities, with optimized functions such as transportation, energy and water use, improving the economy and the environment.

In architecture, urban automation is used to make intelligent buildings that are more energy efficient, and meet human needs of comfort, for example in office environments.

In building construction, it is used in the process of putting up buildings and creating infrastructure. We use drones to survey the physical condition of buildings and roads, and  to access damage of natural disasters and develop more effective responses.

In industrial design, much of that focuses on products we use every day in urban environments, ties into the development of autonomous vehicles, and in the more novel application of wearable technologies,

In music, urban automation can capture and analyze the sounds of a city, helping to track noise pollution, monitor traffic patterns, or generate new musical compositions.

How does your research into the economics of the robotics industry play into this research?

I focus on local economic development planning and how technology drives change that affects the opportunities for work, standards of living, and the strength of local industries that support local economies.

One key point is that the majority of economic activity in our jobs is located in metropolitan areas. We are very much a metropolitan nation, rather than the traditional view of urban and rural nation. So the use of robotics in firms has the potential to make them more competitive and productive. It also has the potential to eliminate jobs, which would affect people’s ability to live in cities and have a high quality of life and standard of living. It also has the potential to change existing work and create new jobs.

My work is focused on understanding this. I’m primarily focused on the manufacturing sector, because that is where robotics are most in use at this point.

What is the most pressing concern that urban automation raises?

The most pressing concern is the reason we are having this forum: ethics and values. We know in many ways that urban automation has the potential to significantly transform the world that we live in. We also know our metro areas have longstanding, yet to be resolved, issues of justice for different communities and demographic groups.

There is a lot of controversy over artificial intelligence, which is a key component of urban automation, and to what extent does it augment, or substitute for, the capacity to make decisions by humans.

All of this has major societal implications. Rather than create the technology without considering these potential impacts, the focus here is on: How do we make choices about the urban automation we use? What is our framework for developing these technologies, to be more conscious of the impact of that?

Relative to that are issues of, "Is it going to be accessible for all? How do we build in safety factors?," because we would hope that “do no harm” is a key criteria for deployment of urban automation.

Will it give us the privacy that we expect to have? Privacy is a highly valued aspect of modern life.

It’s also important to make sure that no one is left out of the benefits that can occur with the best of urban automation has to offer.

How do we address these privacy and ethical concerns?

We don’t yet have all the answers or solutions that we need. That is why it is important to have the discussion that we are planning for in our forum. We need to get these concerns to the forefront of the development of technology.

One pressing concern is informing people about how their data will be used. Much of urban automation is about data collection. That data is used to develop software and hardware, forms of automation, as well as products.

We have some ways to opt out, but it is all primitive and legally driven responses. We need more work on that.

How do we ensure a world that is inclusive and benefits all?

The hope is that urban automation will allow us to optimize the functions of smart cities such as transportation, energy, water use, improve the economy and the environment, and improve access to education and training.

The goal is to improve the functions offered in urban areas and the ability of people to participate in society and the economy.

Urban automation should help the people who create and manage cities achieve goals of “smart cities that are just cities.”

Also on the Panel
Joining Leigh on the panel will be Jason Borenstein, associate director of the Center for Ethics and Technology at the School of Public Policy; Carolyn Phillips, of the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (formerly AMAC Research Center); and Dennis Shelden, director of the Digital Building Lab and a professor in the School of Architecture. Leigh is also a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning.

Borenstein will focus on the ethics of autonomous vehicles and other computing technologies. While they hold much promise, he suggests that ethical issues emerging from their design and deployment must be addressed in a consistent and ongoing manner. Ethical issues that autonomous vehicles raise include the privacy of those who ride in them, vulnerability to hacking, and how they may interact with pedestrians or other entities in the surrounding environment.  

Phillips notes that we are at a defining moment as we gather at the crossroads of urban automation, ethics, and individuals with disabilities. The ethical implications when considering individuals with disabilities quickly move beyond beneficence, justice, and autonomy to specific concerns of privacy, safety, and informed choice. As we create disruptive, transformational technologies, it is critical that we pause to ensure we have employed an ethical framework throughout each phase of development and deployment so we can design for true inclusion. 

Shelden will talk about urban automation from the perspective of the built environment -- buildings, infrastructure and cities  – which is increasingly becoming “smart,” as physical spaces and devices in these spaces are connected to simulations and data platforms on the cloud. This presents opportunities for improved understanding of the behaviors of built environments and the interactions of occupants in these environments. At the same time, important questions of information, individuality, and culture are becoming more pressing. Questions of data privacy and ownership, security, and identity that are becoming critical questions for individuals and for societies will become pressing in the design and operation of the built environment.

About the Research Forums

The College of Design Research Forums allow the College community and our friends across the campus to experience the design- and technology-focused research at Georgia Tech. From music technology to product design; from assistive technology to healthcare; from architecture to city planning, we explore the many ways technology can solve critical problems for the way we live.

This forum will be January 24, 2019, 11 a.m. - Noon, in the Caddell Flex Space.

The final research forum of the 2018-19 academic year is scheduled for Thursday, March 7, in the Caddell Flex Space.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the world’s leading research facilities devoted providing access to materials documenting black life, and promoting the study and interpretation of the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Marble Fairbanks Architects was hired by the New York Public Library to do extensive renovations and an addition to improve the public experience of the Center.

The design enhances how the Schomburg Center interfaces with the public and with the surrounding Harlem community by displaying portions of its vast collection and current events to the street. Features of the design include high definition LED display systems, interactive information panels, display windows for historical artifacts, and a new landscape plaza with distinctive paving, plantings, and seating adjacent to the display areas. The project also includes a new gift shop and conference room building addition along with interior renovations of the Center’s Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division.

Click here for more information about the award.

Click here for the complete list of winners from the Architect's Newspaper Best of Design 2018 Awards.

When architects think of the White House and U.S. Presidents who have influenced design thinking, often the examples cited go way back in history.  For instance, President Teddy Roosevelt would occasionally stroll down New York Avenue and 18th Street to the Octagon House to have dinner with architect Cass Gilbert (among others). Dreams for the future were hatched and plans were developed.

But this week we are reminded that there are other examples showing how the White House and the profession often work together across political lines.  One example at the top of all examples this week is the leadership role of President George H.W. Bush and the ADA. The civil rights act for universal design.

On July 26, 1990 the ADA act was signed into law.  This has had the effect of removing architectural barriers to enable the physically marginalized to be respected and for universal design to be adopted.  All across America building codes and professional standards have changed. Construction was slowed and in some cases stopped for modifications. 

ADA became one of the boldest civil rights initiatives of the 20th Century.  We remember this at the time of George Herbert Walker Bush’s passing.  His design leadership working with the profession and across political boundaries is remembered with great admiration and thanks.

On September 26, 2018, the Diversity and Inclusion Council welcomed Peggy McIntosh, Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and founder of the National S.E.E.D. Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), to campus to help facilitate a conversation about diversity and inclusion between faculty, students, and staff at Georgia Tech. Kaye Husbands Fealing, Professor and Chair of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy and member of the Executive Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017-2020), and Robert Kirkman, Associate Professor for the School of Public Policy, were invited to join in the discussion and share their personal experiences with diversity and inclusion. Following the panel discussion, the Council shared additional questions submitted by the audience with McIntosh, Husbands Fealing, and Kirkman for their input.

Question: What practical methods can be employed to restructure our education system to expand inclusion, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields?

Husbands Fealing: One item I would offer here is to have policies and governance on how to conduct searches for faculty, staff and students, where the search or recruiting committees reflect our diverse society (not just the representation we see on campus).

Question: When you are faced with a tricky situation, what would be a good technique to address it while simultaneously bringing awareness to diversity and inclusion?

McIntosh: I sometimes speak autobiographically and say, "When I am faced with this kind of situation, I automatically go to questions about diversity and inclusion in my own head, and whether they bear on the situation." I also sometimes say, "I have a divided mind here -- feeling both x and y." I try not to sound like the expert, but rather to talk about my process of thinking through how tricky situations are placed within contexts that carry power dynamics and bear on equity.

Husbands Fealing: In my experience, I first think about what the final outcome needs to be before I respond to the situation.  In my experience, I find it expedient to respond with facts and poise.  It is important in my view to have my best self-present.  What will be remembered is not the first affront, but what I do in response.

Question: How do you address people that try to ignore their own power in addressing diversity?

McIntosh: I am not sure what is meant by the phrase "try to ignore." When I am with people who have power through privilege, but don't seem to realize it, I just keep saying again and again that privilege brings power with it and that people who have privilege have far more power than most of them have recognized. I keep raising the question of how people will use their power, their unearned power, to weaken systems of unearned power. I think most white people have been trained to think of themselves as not having much power that they can use towards social change. But indeed we white people have considerable power just through being white, even if we grew up with class disadvantage. 

Husbands Fealing: It is important for everyone to understand that (a) diversity is often a benefit to all over time, and (b) if we create opportunities for growth, then diversity is not a zero-sum game. So, getting individuals to understand that the pie can be bigger even if various groups get larger wedges is key.  Of course, fairness is paramount, but what is perceived to be fair is subjective.

Question: Since you are speaking to a roomful of designers – have you noticed any particular physical design features that support or hinder inclusion?

Husbands Fealing: Yes!  Often I am on a stage where there is no ramp to get to the podium or dais. That is a clear signal to someone with a physical disability that they are not welcomed.

McIntosh: I have noticed that in schools, that is school buildings, the design of the front hall makes a big difference. If there are many tables to sit at and many chairs, that can make it feel like a cafe or a conversation nook. This makes students mingle more freely with people who do not look like them. In fact, I have come to say to school faculty groups that I believe they must reengineer and reshape the school entrance hall to prevent depression! In addition, I strongly recommend that small classes be configured as a circles with everyone facing each other, rather than having some look at the backs of heads of others, in rows. The mode called Serial Testimony is a structure for discussion which matches the circle. People can write to me (mmcintosh@wellesley.edu) to request my description of Serial Testimony. My assistant Rachel Nagin adds, "Buildings tell stories about who we are and what we value. Many recently built school buildings are designed much like prisons and built with cheap materials, which tells us quite lot about what we think of our students, especially our public school students. So as you analyze and design spaces, think about what's being valued."

Question: Can you talk about the importance of transparency in hiring and admissions and how that affects diversity and inclusion? Also how can we have increased diversity among faculty and professionals?

Husbands Fealing: This is a really complex question that requires several paragraphs to respond adequately.  So, in a nutshell, recognition that diversity, inclusion, and equity are important in concept and practice is paramount.  Leadership should be all-in, not just making comments in the open but not following through with actions—policies are guidelines to actions.  Often I hear, “Well, we just cannot find anyone…they don’t exist.” That is just not the case, though in some fields there is a low percentage of women or minorities. Networks can be used to find individuals to interview or to work on projects. The one caveat I should mention here—many of us get over worked and need to say “no” sometimes when asked to take on tasks. Junior faculty should be protected from placement on such committees. Yet, there is work to be done.

McIntosh: To increase diversity among faculty and professionals, they must be willing to redesign job descriptions, putting them on a broader base than before. This means rethinking everything that the institution is about. They must make sure that any candidate pool includes people from marginalized groups. Search committees must do the extra work needed and cast their nets wide to get beyond the usual habits of search committees, which include "looking for the best man for the job." 

Question: How can we improve diversity without tokenizing people?

McIntosh: In two universities where I have worked, the decision was made to hire two people of color at least, rather than one, for a previously all-white department, and two or more women for a previously all-male department. This helped to work against the appearance and feelings of tokenism. 

Husbands Fealing: Exactly…this is really important and, again, would take a few paragraphs to give examples of how this could work.  Perhaps the best answer to this question is found in the literature.  Someone should do a brief literature search to give readers of the article ability to explore this topic in more detail.  Attached, please find a report on this topic that a colleague and I prepared for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in fulfilment of a grant from NSF. We also published a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist in May 2018: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/absb/62/5.

Let’s keep this conversation going! We need to hear from you on other ways we can broaden and raise awareness on key themes related to diversity and inclusion at Georgia Tech. Send your questions to Carmen Wagster, carmen.wagster@design.gatech.edu, and we will continue this discussion to help us all pursue a more diverse and inclusive community here at Georgia Tech.

The College of Design Diversity and Inclusion Council members include Julie Kim, Associate Chair for the School of Architecture; Catherine Ross, Harry West Professor for the School of City and Regional Planning and Director for the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development; Jerry Ulrich, Associate Professor for the School of Music; Xinyi Song, Assistant Professor for the School of Building Construction; Michelle Rinehart, ex-officio Council member and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Outreach for the College of Design; Astha Bhavsar, undergraduate student, School of Architecture; and Chirag Venkatesan, graduate student, School of Building Construction.

These massive structures are composed of high-performance glass and carbon fibers infused with polymeric resins. Separating the fibers and resins is cost-prohibitive, and so the materials cannot be recycled.  The project, titled Re-Wind, will develop applications for the re-purposing of entire blades or large segments of blades.

The Design Thrust of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project is led by Georgia Tech and includes Russell Gentry, PI, associate professor and director of the Master of Science in Architecture program, and Tristan Al-Haddad, part-time lecturer, along with Benjamin Tasistro-Hart, a senior in the School of Architecture.  Benjamin received Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) funding from the NSF to participate in the project, and will be traveling to Ireland to assist the scientists and engineers at UCC and QUB with geometric modeling of the blades.

According to Gentry, the project is a perfect fit for the research and academic profile of the School of Architecture. “The faculty and students in the School of Architecture are widely recognized for their ability to deal with complex geometry,” Gentry said. “In addition, with the research history and resources in our Digital Fabrication Laboratory (DFL), we are capable of dealing with a wide range of material systems.” 

Gentry, who chairs the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards committee on Composites for Civil Infrastructure noted, “We have spent the last 25 years developing fiber reinforced composite materials for use in buildings, bridges, and other major infrastructure like wind blades, but have failed to address how these materials can be re-cycled, or even better, re-purposed.  We see the Re-Wind project as the first instance of a number of potential projects focused on the creative re-use of infrastructure materials.”

Thanks to Gentry's civil engineering affiliation, the School of Architecture is able to join forces for courses and research with faculty and students in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In the 2019 spring semester, Al-Haddad and Gentry will lead a workshop on wind blade reuse.  Students from the School of Architecture will develop design propositions and prototypes for second lives of wind blades. The design propositions developed at Georgia Tech will be used by colleagues in Ireland to assess ecological, economic, and societal impacts associated with wind blade re-use. The same designs will be used by colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast and the City University of New York to assess the residual fatigue life of the composite wind blades and the structural efficacy of the re-use scenarios.

For more information, see the Re-Wind website and papers from the Re-Wind Design Thrust.

www.re-wind.info

Gentry, Russell, Bank, Lawrence C., Chen, Jian-Fei, Arias, Franco and Al-Haddad, Tristan (2018), “Adaptive Reuse of FRP Composite Wind Turbine Blades for Civil Infrastructure Construction”, 9th International Conference on Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites in Civil Engineering (CICE 2018), July 17-19, 2018, Paris, France.

Morrow, Ruth, Gentry, Russell and Al-Haddad, Tristan (2018), “Re-Wind: Architectural Design Studio and the Re-Purposing of Wind Turbine Blades”, Proceedings, SEEDS: Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland, 6-7 September 2018.

Lawrence C. Bank, Franco R. Arias, Ardavan Yazdanbakhsh, T. Russell Gentry, Tristan Al-Haddad, Jian-Fei Chen, Ruth Morrow (2018), “Concepts for Reusing Composite Materials from Decommissioned Wind Turbine Blades in Affordable Housing”, Recycling, 3(1), 3; doi:10.3390/recycling3010003.

As noted in McCuan and Pye’s artistic narrative, “Sentinel optimizes the livability of the site at each point in time while offering solutions for its long-term survival amid environmental threats, particularly flooding, caused by torrential rainfall, long term sea-level rise, and rising ambient temperatures.”

Frederick Pearsall, senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and McCuan and Pye’s mentor for this project, encouraged the students to research and explore everything there is to know about Melbourne’s culture, history, and geography, which lead McCuan and Pye to better understand the City of Port Phillip’s drought and flooding challenges.  

Click here to read more about McCuan and Pye’s project from the Land Art Generator Initiative.

The series titled, “REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Tech” will devote an evening to each of the topics of equity, social capital, climate change, out-of-date infrastructure, technological disruption, and urban economics. The evening’s program will feature both a presentation and a public conversation between two top experts on that topic. Subjects will range from the impact of autonomous vehicles on cities, gentrification without displacement, and green vs grey infrastructure’s capacity to adapt to climate change, just to name a few.

Organizing and leading this series is Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of Georgia Tech’s Master of Science in Urban Design degree. Dunham-Jones was recently recognized as Architectural Record’s Women Educator of 2018 award and in 2017, Dunham-Jones was ranked among Planetizen’s Top 100 Most Influential Urbanists. Dunham-Jones will oversee the production of videos and podcasts from the series for broad impact.

Messner and his wife, Jenny Messner, created the Speedwell Foundation, an organization focused on restoring and expanding public parks and green spaces in cities around the U.S. Their foundation also helps fund up to 30 study abroad scholarships each year for high school students from central Pennsylvania.

“As a top tier university in the dynamic city of Atlanta, there’s no place better than Georgia Tech to bring together leading minds to work on the biggest challenges facing cities," said Messner. “Jenny and I are thrilled that our family foundation can support this lecture series and the dissemination of the results to the larger public and decisionmakers.”

The School of Architecture plans to host six talks during the 2018-2019 academic year. To stay up-to-date on the upcoming lecture series, please complete this form https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities-speedwell-foundation-talks-georgia-tech to join our mailing list.

In an article published in the Summer 2018 edition of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine titled, “Helping Strangers in a Strange Land” by Melissa Fralick noted that Karim started Design4Refugees while in graduate school at Tech in 2014. The organization was designed to build shelters that could be implemented in the Iraqi camps serving refugees as they were fled war-torn Syria. Collaborative design and labor supported by a modest crowdfunding budget of $4,000, a community center began to take shape. “It wasn’t me watching and directing—it was me in the dirt with them laying brick,” Karim said. “From that, they developed a trust and connection with us.”

Click here to view Karim's story featured in the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. 

In addition to his new role as director of the M.S. in Architecture program, Gentry will continue his work as associate professor of architecture and civil engineering. Gentry is a licensed structural engineer and an expert in the design, modeling, and testing of complex structures – having recently completed a U.S. Patent for a photovoltaic mounting and racking system using composite materials. He is also the principal investigator on a Department of Energy project to develop self-consolidating concrete for externally-reinforced concrete structures.

Gentry has served as the faculty advisory for the M.S. in Architecture digital design and fabrication concentration. Gentry can often be found in the Digital Fabrication Lab, teaching courses on masonry and fabrication. Gentry also co-teaches a course on environmental impacts and energy use in buildings, Green Construction, and an applied housing studio, Zero Energy Housing, with Georgia Tech colleagues Godfried Augenbroe and Michael Gamble. He is the author of “Building Systems, Controls, and Automation”, published in Design and Construction of High Performance Homes, Franca Trubiano, editor.

The M.S. in Architecture degree provides students holding professional degrees in architecture (B.Arch or M.Arch) or with equivalent degrees in allied fields of design or engineering with research‐based knowledge that is applicable to the advancement of professional practice. Designed to leverage the active research programs in the School of Architecture, the M.S. in Architecture program offers five concentrations, and each concentration is associated with a research facility or lab in the College of Design. Students can pursue concentrations in advanced production, building information and systems, design computation, design and health, and high performance buildings.

In December 2017, students from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Architecture proposed an origami design that earned them an opportunity to travel to Japan to learn from Tomohiro Tachi, a widely-known origami expert and associate professor in graphic and computer sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Master of Architecture students, Leila Moghimi (’18) and Kashmira Ranadive (’18), enrolled in an origami-focused civil engineering course in fall 2017 semester, a course taught by Glaucio Paulino, Raymond Allen Jones Chair and professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“The reason that we opted for this class,” Ranadive said, “ was because it was parallel to our studio project. Almost the entire studio was in our class except maybe three students. It was kind of like a collaborative exercise between Daniel Baerlecken and Glaucio Paulino.” Moghimi, Ranadive, and their classmates were encouraged by Daniel Baerlecken, associate professor in the School of Architecture, to take the class as it related to the origami-based coursework in his design and research studio.

For the full story, click here. 

Connell earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1953 and completed his Master of City Planning in 1955 from Georgia Tech. After earning his degrees, Connell moved to Columbus, Ohio to serve as the principal planner for the Columbus City Planning Commission. At that time, he also worked as an associate professor of urban planning at The Ohio State University from 1957-1963. In the 1960s, Connell taught at Columbia University and the University of Virginia before returning to Tech to teach classes in urban planning and renewal and historic preservation in the School of Architecture.

“When you look through the Georgia Tech archives, you will see Pat Connell‘s name on all the unsung committee reports from the 1970s that were instrumental in establishing the Master of Architecture degree at our school,” said George Johnston, professor in the School of Architecture. “What’s even more impressive is that Pat had an incredibly vibrant second career and maybe even third after he retired from Georgia Tech. What a great example he was.”

Beyond the classroom, Connell put his passion for historic preservation into action. Shortly after returning to Atlanta, Connell served as chairman of the Atlanta Civic Design Commission. As chairman, Connell helped co-found the Atlanta Landmarks, a group of progressive politicians, civic leaders, and celebrities who joined forces to lead the “Save the Fox” campaign to prevent the demolition of Atlanta’s Fox Theatre.

Of Connell’s influence in saving the Fox Theater, Lane Duncan, senior lecturer in the School of Architecture said, “Pat Connell’s efforts in forming the Atlanta Landmarks in the early seventies not only ‘Saved the Fox’ but became a rallying cry for generations of historic preservation initiatives in the state of Georgia.

Connell was also instrumental in the preservation of the Pasaquan site in Buena Vista, Georgia and Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill preservation and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood revitalization.

Alongside his late wife, Martha, the Connells had an impressive collection of contemporary crafts and fine arts objects. Together, they co-founded the Great American Gallery, Atlanta’s unique contribution to contemporary crafts and fine arts objects. Many of the works that they curated now reside in leading museums and private collections around the U.S.

In 2016, Connell made a generous contribution to Georgia Tech to create the Connell Workshop. This course, taught in the spring semesters by Duncan, explores a wide range of issues in hand drawing, including tone, line, contour, gesture, composition, iterative geometry, and the humanistic forces that shape them. These drawing and critical thinking investigations are divided into two general categories—perception, the way we see the world, and conception, the way we attempt to order the world. 

Of the importance of hand drawing, Connell said, “Drawing requires that all the sensory apparatus of the body participate in the process of creating an image of the observed or imagined stimulus. Unlike the camera, which records only a split-second view of the object, the act of drawing is not time-dependent. The act of image-making informs and instructs the brain to keep looking for all the messages being sent. The image-maker always decides when to make changes and when the work is ‘finished.’ The Gestalt is there for the taking by anyone.”

Duncan remembers Connell as, “A true scholar who believed that hand drawing is a vital ‘technology’ to seeing and understanding the world around us and that it is an essential tool for the architect no matter what generation.” He added, “His contributions to drawing and thinking live on in the work of every student that has taken the class.”

As Scott Marble, Chair of the School of Architecture, reflected on Connell's contributions to the School, he said, "At a time when our entire experience in seeing and creating the physical world is mediated through digital technology of one sort or another, Connell’s commitment to the bodily nature of drawing reminds us, both faculty and students, that thinking and discovering through drawing has enduring value in architectural education."

Ellen Dunham-Jones, School of Architecture professor and director of the Master of Science in Urban Design program, is the assigned researcher for the Shared Autonomous Vehicle Study. Led by the city of Chamblee, this project will explore improvements in mobility using autonomous vehicles that travel from MARTA stations around the community.

According to Ben Limmer, MARTA Assistant General Manager of Planning, "This project pioneers solutions for transit connectivity and sets Chamblee out as a leader in autonomous shuttle technology not only in Georgia, but also the United States."

To view the full article to learn more about the Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, click here.

The Ventulett Chair is made possible by a generous endowment created in honor of Georgia Tech alumnus Tom Ventulett, founding partner of tvsdesign in Atlanta. The intention of the Ventulett Chair is to engage an exceptional practitioner with a record of international leadership and excellence in architecture. As Ventulett Chair, Mesa will teach in the School and develop significant initiatives to heighten the critical importance of design in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, nationally and internationally.

Mesa will also develop academic initiatives to advance architectural design and construction methodologies in her design studios and seminars. Her vision of research and practice is one in which, as Mesa says, “enthusiasm meets perseverance, imagination meets rigor and leadership meets teamwork.” Mesa aims to cultivate synergies between academy and practice and empower students to have a voice in the making of our cities.

Mesa joined Ensamble Studio in 2003 and became a partner of the firm in 2010. As a European Licensed Architect with a studio based in both Madrid and Boston, Mesa has made her mark as a leader in international practice. Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team that balances education, research and practice and transcends methodical, technological and disciplinary conventions to address issues as diverse as construction of the landscape to the prefabrication of the house.

Prior to the appointment, Mesa served as visiting professor for the Pratt Institute and in 2017 served as the Benjamin Menschel visiting professor at The Cooper Union. Since 2011, Mesa has been part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first as visiting professor and later as a research scientist, after co-founding the Prototypes of Prefabrication Research Laboratory (POPlab) in 2012.

In early 2018, an impressive shortlist of Ventulett candidates visited the Georgia Tech campus to meet with current students and faculty and present a lecture about their current work to the School of Architecture. Joining Mesa on the shortlist were Susannah C. Drake, founding principal of DLANDstudio, and Rozana Montiel, founder and director of Estudio de Arquitectura.  

Previous Ventulett Chairs include Marc Simmons, founding partner of the international design and façade consulting practice Front, Monica Ponce de Leon, current dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture, Nader Tehrani, founder of architectural firm NADAAA and dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and Lars Spuybroek, founder of art and architecture design firm Nox, and currently a professor in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech.

The NEXT Fellowship is a two-year appointment intended for young faculty who are at the beginning of their careers and are interested in interdisciplinary teaching and research that merges design, technology and culture. The initiative was introduced in the fall of 2017 when Jonathan Dessi-Olive was appointed as the first Ventulett NEXT Generation Visiting Fellow. Noel will join Dessi-Olive for the 2018-2019 academic year.

Noel kicked off her career with an impressive list of accomplishments that will lend themselves to her position as a NEXT Fellow. As a research scientist, computational designer, artist and architect, her work largely focuses on craft and cultural design practices, computational making, and lightweight architecture.

After earning her professional degree in architecture from Howard University, Noel worked with Burt Hill, an international design firm in Washington, D.C. and Ahmedabad, India. She later graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Design Computation Group and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in design computing at Penn State University.

Noel taught design computation and digital design and fabrication at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She is also the founder, creator and editor of Architecture Caribbean, an online platform that showcased and promoted design by Caribbean nationals. In 2015, Noel gave a TEDx Talk titled, “The Power of Making: Craft, Computation, and Carnival” at TEDxPortofSpain.

Ventulett NEXT Generation Fellows teach design studios and workshops at both the undergraduate and graduate level and participate actively in the life of the school. Noel and Dessi-Olive will work together in the 2018-2019 year to advance their individual interests in teaching and design research.

“For a time about 10 or 20 years ago, it became fashionable to criticize Brutalist buildings because they did not age well; they looked a little bit depressing; they were grey in tone, and they sort of were associated with architects imposing their will on the community,” Bafna said. “[The Central Atlanta Library] is Breuer trying to rethink postmodernism in his own terms—and very late in his career.”

Bafna often shares Breuer’s work in his courses at Georgia Tech. In 2016, his design studio used the Central Atlanta Library for a project in which his students created their own versions of the library.

To view Sonit Bafna’s discussion with Curbed Atlanta and to view student projects from Bafna’s 2016 studio, click here.

Each year, Georgia Tech submits several teams to the competition. This year eight teams and 40 students participated. The finalist projects are called “Absorption” and “The EArL,” standing for the Eastern Arts Link.

The Absorption team included Coston Dickinson (MSUD), Justina Everhart (MCRP), Tara Garland (MRED) Trent Miller (M.Arch), and Carley Rickles (MSUD), advised by Lecturer David Haddow and Greg Catoe of Selig Enterprises.

“In December when we were forming teams, I had no idea what to expect,” said Justina Everhart, MCRP student on the Absorption team. “As I reflect on the whirlwind of the two-week competition period, I am so proud of my team for persisting through the challenge. The competition is structured in a way that demands innovation, collaboration, and enthusiasm. It revived my creative interests and gave me the privilege of learning from four exceptionally talented, interdisciplinary teammates who have since inspired me to pursue more creative, unconventional projects.”

The EArL team included Miram Alzaabi (MSUD), Jonathan Franklin (M.Arch), Clare Healey (MCRP), Zach Lancaster (MCRP), and Paul Steidl (M.Arch/MCRP), advised by Associate Professor Sabir Kahn and Tim Perry of North American Properties.

“We are thrilled to learn that we have been selected as one of four finalists in this year’s competition,” said Zachary Lancaster, MCRP student, on behalf of the EArL team. “We want to thank the faculty, staff and volunteers from the College of Design for all their support and feedback in the process of developing our submission, in particular we want to thank our advisors Sabir Khan and Ellen Dunham-Jones. We are excited to represent Georgia Tech in the finals and look forward to taking our vision of a diverse, high density cultural district in Toronto's emerging east side further.”

The ULI Hines Student Competition brings together students from different disciplines to envision a better built environment. Each team of five students has to have at least three disciplines represented. Teams are tasked with creating a development program for a real site in a North American city, with this year focused on an area near the mouth of Don River in Toronto. The teams have two weeks to compile designs, market-based financial data, and related narratives in a final proposal.

The final round will be held in Toronto on April 5. Students are invited to present to a jury panel and the final winner will be announced. In the weeks to come each team is given the opportunity to expand on their initial proposals, adding more detail. Each finalist team will receive $10,000 and the will receive $50,000. To see the official announcement from the ULI, click here. For more information on the ULI Hines Student Competition, click here.

“I have loved theme parks for a long, long time,” said Forbes, who is graduating this semester with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Georgia Tech’s College of Design. “I was the weirdo who would build attractions out of his Lego sets.”

He didn’t like just building the rides. He wanted to create the park.

Read his story

In addition to their own intuition about structures, students used calculation methods introduced in the Structures I class, taught by Jim Case and Chris Putman. Many of the groups also used a graphical (drawing-based) method of calculation called graphic statics to more intuitively design and calculate the forces in their designs. Graphic Statics was introduced this year by Ventulett NEXT Generation Visiting Fellow, Jonathan Dessi-Olive in a series of three lectures given to Structures students in October.

In teams of three to four, students were tasked to design, calculate and build a wooden “bridge” structure that would be tested to failure. Structures were made of balsa wood and glue and had to span 30 inches. The goal was for the teams to design minimum weight wood structures that, when tested to failure, would break at 100 pounds.

The teams made initial design proposals and calculations, which were presented and pinned up for review in early November. The reviewers included engineers from Uzun+Case, as well as Georgia Tech faculty from the Schools of Architecture and Civil Engineering. This valuable review session gave students the opportunity to talk to professionals about their designs, go over calculations, and discuss construction and fabrication strategies.

On November, 29, the teams arrived at the Digital Fabrication Lab with their constructed balsa wood bridges. With the assistance of Professor Russell Gentry, each bridge was tested to failure. Students completed the assignment by writing a report describing their process, analyzing their data collected from load testing, and reflecting on their experience working as designers, engineers and builders.

The following are the winning teams:

Best Strength to weight ratio – and highest capacity:

• “Team Bridge” (Jane Ilyasova, Suzanne Shorrosh, Yuki Okamoto, Josh Putrasahan) The team’s structure weighed 0.55 lbs and carried 318lbs

Tied for failure closest to 100lbs:

• “No Name” (Yifan Zhuang, Shejie Li, Jianan Kang, Jiahe Xu) The team’s structure weighed 0.37 lbs and carried 87.6lbs
• “Can't Truss This” (Amy Stone, Marco Ancheita, Emily Wirt) The team’s structure weighed 0.56 lbs and carried 87.9lbs

In the episode, “The First Skyscrapers,” which premiered Saturday, November 11, 2017, Flowers joined Bridget Kendall and guest experts, founding director and curator of the Skyscraper Museum, Carol Willis, and architectural author, Thomas Leslie, as they discussed the early days of skyscrapers and how these structures have impacted and shaped city skylines.

Explaining the early reception of growing city skylines, Flowers said, “I think there was an attendant ambiguity about to what extent building tall represented an opportunity but also to what extent it represented a threat to a kind of way of life, where suddenly your access to sun and air was dramatically altered by the creation of structures that changed the skyline but also changed the nature of life at the street scale pretty significantly.”

In the early days of skyscrapers, buildings were constructed to address the scarcity of real estate and the incentive to build tall on limited amounts of land.  Today, skyscrapers are more often about power.

“I think the interesting thing is that if you think about where the tallest building in the world now sits,” he said, “it’s that the very forces that we associate with driving the rise of the skyscraper… simply does not apply in the case of Dubai, where you have a spine of skyscrapers surrounded by a sea of low, four to five story constructions and is surrounded by little or nothing. And so, what you see now is an increasing demand on the part of clients to build tall, not in response to economic considerations or even to considerations of demand.”

Flowers continued, “I think in some ways as of yet, we have not seen the topping out of what the opportunities are.”

To hear Flowers discuss “The First Skyscrapers” on the BBC World Services episode of “The Forum”, visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvsf9.

Drivers, builders, designers, engineers, executives, and even academics with ties to Georgia Tech made their mark on the worlds of stock car and drag racing.

Read the Full Story:

Georgia Tech's Racing Roots, Part 2: The Need for Speed

Each of the projects is tied to the Living Building at Georgia Tech (and is funded in part through the Kendeda Fund gift that’s paying for the building). But the real focus of the pilots is longterm: to leverage both the Living Building at Tech and the university’s academic firepower by developing tools and processes that can improve buildings.

See More at: http://livingbuilding.kendedafund.org/2017/07/26/6-pilot-projects-involve-students-in-living-building/

See More at: https://nextvisionaries.com/video-ted/ted-video-retrofitting-suburbia/

More Info: http://pci-foundation.org/blog.cfm/Expanding_Our_Reach/PCI_Foundation_Adds_Studio_at_Georgia_Tech/

Findley is CEO of Quest Renewables, a startup that licenses Georgia Tech research, and this particular solar canopy is the company's most extensive project to date. When fully operational, the system will generate enough electricity to power nine home games per season.

“It blows people’s minds,” Findley said, explaining to the investor how his company’s QuadPod Solar Canopy system will work. “It still blows my mind a little bit.”

Read the full story: It's Gonna Be a Bright, Sunshiny Day

Attendees included DBL members, Georgia Tech researchers, and a number of industry leaders from AISC, Arcom, Autodesk, Component Assembly Systems, Constructivity, HOK, Katerra, NIBS, Nucor, and Vectorworks.

The three-day event was held in May and included a DBL Members’ Meeting and two days of industry workshops with focused discussions on industry advancement.

Dennis Shelden, director of the DBL and an associate professor at the School of Architecture in the College of Design, said, “We were very encouraged by the level of interest shown, from our existing DBL members, new organizations interested in the program, and research faculty. Over the coming weeks we will be reviewing the results of the meeting and connecting DBL members to research projects. We are also ramping up for some really significant activities around the annual DBL Symposium on October 5-6, 2017.”

Georgia Tech faculty and students reviewed research proposals, including “Clash Prediction Based on Space Gridding by Bayesian Analysis in BIM Projects,” “ASE Program Opportunities,” “KBAD: Knowledge Base for Architectural Detailing,” and “Mixed Reality‐Enabled Spatiotemporal City Infrastructure Data‐Capture.”

The first workshop explored subcontracting trades’ data standards and workflows. The DBL has performed data standard and information delivery (IDM / MVD) development for numerous trades over the past decade. A number of new technical developments promise renewed interest and value for this standardization work: extending the data standards to web-based information exchanges and developing overall industry frameworks for data exchange workflows.

Participants received an overview of existing work and discussed potential forward-looking applications of the data to future industry data initiatives. The workshop brought together representatives of the industry trade organizations with leaders of next generation data and exchange initiatives.

The second workshop examined AEC web data services technologies. Web- and internet-data and communications protocols are rapidly evolving as needs for data interoperability and exchange encounter new demands of technology paradigms, including web microservices, web ontology applications (OLWL), and the Internet of Things (IoT). The existing technical frameworks for AEC data exchange (IFC / EXPRESS) are being reconsidered in light of these developments. The workshop’s goal was to initiate a set of research and development tasks to develop out this next generation AEC data architecture.

To view more photos from the event, please visit the DBL Facebook page.

Click here to view Wei's submission on density. 

More details: http://www.somfoundation.som.com/award/china-prize 

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Click here for full story and to review a list of the Spring 2017 Capstone Design Expo Winners.

https://energy.gov/eere/buildings/2017-race-zero-results

Photo credit: Ellen Jaskol/NREL, DOE Race to Zero

This year, associate professors Jude LeBlanc and Russel Gentry, along with gradudate student Matt Peterka took on the challenge and submitted their "Kite/Folly" proposal to be considered in the design/build competion. Although their abstract did not win, the three were premiated and their submission will soon be highlighted on the The Architectural League of New York's website, in addition to being featured in the upcoming 2017 Socrates Sculpture Park publication. 

Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League launched the annual Folly program in 2012 to create an opportunity for emerging architects and designers to build projects in the public realm and explore the boundaries between architecture and sculpture. Following the precedent of the 2016 competition, Folly 2017 fuses form with utility, merging FOLLY and FUNCTION.

Click here to view their abstract proposal. 

Leigh is the associate dean for research in the College and last fall secured a grant from the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative to study the U.S. robotics industry and its economic impacts. She also is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning.

She gave us her thoughts on robotics research and the industry.

1. Why should anyone research the robotics industry?

Robots are being developed and “employed” across the economy, on farms, in factories, warehouses, hotels and hospitals, to name just a few types of businesses using them. They will fundamentally transform daily life and work. Researchers are essential to making that transformation happen from a creative and technical perspective. They also have a key role to play in ensuring that robotics diffusion is not simply imposed upon society in a way the causes winners and losers, but, rather, leads to robotics’ full potential for enhancing all human experience and safeguarding the physical world.

2. How will robots affect city and regional planning?

City and regional planning includes a number of specializations that focus on the world in which we live, such as economic development, environment, housing, land use, and transportation. Robotics diffusion will affect all of these areas, but, currently, the most attention is being given to how autonomous vehicles (a kind of robot) will alter our transportation infrastructure, as well as greatly reduce the number of driver jobs.

3. Your peers are inventing and improving robots: What does Georgia Tech need to do to shape a future with robots?

We are already shaping a robotic future at Georgia Tech, but there is much to be done. Within the College of Design, in a great example of how robots can contribute to the arts and empowering those with disabilities, music Professor Gil Weinberg has developed a marimba-playing robotic musician that uses machine learning for jazz improvisation, as well as a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human drumming abilities. Associate Professor Russell Gentry offers a great example for architecture; he is using a Kuka robot for teaching robotic fabrication and for researching humans – robot collaboration in a fabrication setting.

4. What else should the Design academic community research about robots? 

We have a major research focus on assistive technologies involving several schools and research centers of the College of Design and robots will be an increasing part of such technologies. How robots navigate existing street, sidewalk and building infrastructure, and how their presence might influence future design of such infrastructure is another rich research area. And how the deployment of robots in multiple economic sectors affects current and future jobs will be a critical economic development question tying in with many aspects of the Design academic community.

The Faculty & Staff Honors Luncheon recognizes those who have received accolades and awards throughout the previous academic year. More than 75 of Georgia Tech's best and brightest will receive honors at the luncheon. 

Click HERE to RSVP 

Guest parking is available in the Area 2 or Area 3 Visitor lots. Please note, Georgia Tech's Earth Day will also occur on Friday, April 21, so parking may be limited. Guests are encouraged to arrive early. 

North West Bond

• Paul Steidl, M.Arch
• Matt Bedsole, MCRP
• Yifan Li, M.Arch
• Patricia Samartzis, M.Arch
• Hanxue Wei, MSUD
• Faculty Advisor: Sabir Khan
• ULI Advisor: Marc N. Brambrut, Sr VP Development Novare Group

Chicago Fit

• Alice Wang, MSUD
• Juntao Guan, M.Arch
• Jonathan Franklin, M.Arch
• Jian Pang, MCRP
• YanLin Wu, MCRP
• Faculty Advisor: Richard Dagenhart
• Faculty Advisor: David Haddow

The ULI Hines Student Competition—having just completed its 15th year—offers graduate students the opportunity to form their own multidisciplinary teams and engage in a challenging exercise in responsible land use.

Student teams comprising at least three disciplines have two weeks to devise a comprehensive design and development program for a real, large-scale site full of challenges and opportunities. Submissions will consist of boards that include drawings, site plans, tables, and market-feasible financial data.

11 multi-disciplinary teams from Georgia Tech submitted variously-anchored mixed-use development proposals for a former industrial site on the North Branch of the Chicago River. The 11 submissions are on display as part of the HINES ULI COMPETITION ENTRIES 2017 EXHIBITION until March 11^th in the Cohen Gallery aka The Bridge between Arch East and Arch West.

Professor Dagenhart shared his experiences in the course:

“An urban design charrette is always a good way for students and faculty to work collaboratively,  creating proposals to address complex problems in only a week or two. Our Learning from Savannah Charrette went a step farther by combining students and faculty from three universities, seven countries and seven languages, and several disciplines - architecture, urban design, city planning, landscape architecture, and real estate development. For the students, the charrette was an immediate immersion into a global and urban world where they will practice their future professions.  And we had a good time, too.”

The students and faculty then returned to their home universities to complete the urban design project on the selected site in Atlanta. In May, representatives from the three schools will meet in Shanghai at Tongji University for comparative studio presentations. A publication will contain and conclude the collaborate studio research+design project. 

Five College of Design instructors have won the 2016 Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award. This award is given to a maximum of 40 Georgia Tech teachers who received the best scores on the Course-Instructor Opinion Survey for the question, "Overall, this instructor is an effective teacher".

The prize includes a one-time pre-tax award of $1000 and having their name printed in the Celebrating Teaching Day (March 14, 2017) program.

School of Architecture: Michael Gamble

Michael Gamble, an associate professor in the School of Architecture, won the award for instructing ARCH 6069: Advanced Architecture Design I. Gamble also won the award in 2015, 2013, and 2012. He is the director of graduate studies for the School of Architecture, creative director for Gamble + Gamble Architects in Atlanta, and known for examining the environmental impact of design decisions, notably through his work with housing, energy, and building technologies.

Gamble’s research has received grants from: The Alcoa Foundation, The Kendeda Foundation, Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and the National Endowments of the Arts. He also received First Prize for Research in an international competition sponsored by the Environmental Design and Research Association.

School of City & Regional Planning: Dan Immergluck

Dan Immergluck won the 2016 award for instructing CP 6630: Government and Housing Markets. He's won the award twice before, both for CP 6611 | Real Estate Finance and Development.

As a professor in the School of City & Regional Planning, Immergluck teaches courses in statistics, real estate finance, housing policy, and social justice and equity planning. Professor Immergluck’s research concerns affordable housing, neighborhood change, community development finance, economic development, and other topics. His applied research focuses on housing and development issues in Atlanta as well as cities around the country.

Dan is the author of four books, more than four dozen scholarly articles, numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries, and scores of applied research reports. His scholarship is widely cited, and he has been quoted extensively in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and other media. He has testified several times before Congress and the Federal Reserve Board.

School of Industrial Design: Young-Mi Choi

Young-Mi Choi, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design, won the award for instructing ID 2022: ID Studio II. The class is set up to give students the chance to interact with a variety of users, such as users with spinal cord injuries confined to a wheelchair or users with visual impairments. This allows them to practice engagement techniques with real users, obtain feedback and test their designs.

Choi teaches product development, human factors, and ergonomics. Her research activities focus on applying evidence-based design in innovation and human-centered design. Her research focuses on topics related to the roles played by users, industrial designers, engineers, and marketers during the process of creating new products and assistive technologies. She is also the director of the I³ Lab and a project director with the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wireless Inclusive Technologies (WIT RERC). She has received the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program Women of Excellence Award, Outstanding Faculty Award and multiple course teaching effectiveness awards.

School of Industrial Design: Stephen Sprigle

​Stephen Sprigle, a Professor with appointments in Bioengineering, Industrial Design and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, won the award for instructing ID 6100 -- a required class for students in the Industrial Design and Human-Computer Interaction graduate programs.The class targets the science of design, professional ethics and responsible conduct of research. Students are challenged to think through the trade-offs between various design research methods, and discuss the history and profession of industrial design.

A biomedical engineer with a license in physical therapy, Sprigle directs the Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research Lab (REARLab), which focuses on applied disability research and development. The REARLab’s research interests include the biomechanics of wheelchair seating and posture, pressure ulcer prevention, and manual wheelchair propulsion. Its development activities include standardized wheelchair and cushion testing and the design of assistive and diagnostic technologies.

School of Music: Jason Freeman

Jason Freeman, a Professor in the School of Music, won the award for instructing MUSI 6003: Music Technology: History and Repertoire. His artistic practice and scholarly research focus on using technology to engage diverse audiences in collaborative, experimental, and accessible musical experiences. He also develops educational interventions (such as EarSketch) in K-12, university, and MOOC environments that broaden and increase engagement in STEM disciplines through authentic integrations of music and computing. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, exhibited at ACM SIGGRAPH, published by Universal Edition, broadcast on public radio’s Performance Today, and commissioned through support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Freeman’s wide-ranging work has attracted support from sources such as the National Science Foundation, Google, and Turbulence. He has published his research in leading conferences and journals such as Computer Music Journal, Organised Sound, NIME, and ACM SIGCSE. Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University.

Shani Sharif, graduate student at Georgia Tech in Architecture

Shani Sharif, an architect and researcher, is currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Computational Design at the School of Architecture.

Melanie Metal, graduate student at Georgia Tech in Planning

Melani Metal is pursuing a Master of City and Regional Planning in the School of City and Regional Planning.

Georgia CEFPI provided the awards to these two students stating "Your submission was deemed as stellar and your response was succinct and commendable. The selection committee wanted to convey their appreciation for your hard work and the effort you have put into your field of study."

Shani Sharif expressed her appreciation for the award stating "It is a great honor to receive Walter H. Fairchild Scholarship from Georgia CEFPI. I am truly thankful that Georgia CEFPI recognizes students’ academic achievements, and by awarding this scholarship supports and encourages higher education. "

BIMForum is one of the nation’s most important conferences on building information modeling (BIM) – a new development in design and construction using three-dimensional models for architecture, engineering, and construction.

Georgia Tech was the only academic program that had a formal presence at this event, according to Dennis Shelden, one of the event organizers. Students from architecture, civil engineering, and building construction joined the meetings, staffed a booth with an academic poster series, and discussed their work and papers with senior leaders of many of the top construction firms in the country.

Shelden, also director of the Digital Building Lab, said the students were received well. “The professional community was enthusiastic to have our students engaged in the event and to make the connection bridging between educational and professional work,” he said.

Two of those students talked about their experiences.

Keresh Afsari is a Ph.D. candidate in architecture focusing on design computation. She presented two posters at the booth. About six students staffed the booth, which also held work from master’s students as well as research papers from several students who work with the DBL.

One highlight of the conference for Afsari was a session on open BIM and the standardization of BIM data exchange. She called BIM standardization her "passion" and what she has been working on for the past few years.

The key, she said, is standardization and whether different industries -- architecture, construction, and engineering -- can communicate with each other.

Another student at the booth was Jeffrey Collins, a Ph.D. student in architecture and instructor in the undergraduate Media and Modeling class. He co-teaches with Shelden, who is also an associate professor in the School of Architecture.

Collins said he found it interesting to see the representation of industry, academia, professionals, and software manufacturers, and the overlap of what people are working on in all those fields.

He said it is “always beneficial to talk about the work I have done. … My poster is still in progress so it is always nice to think about it for a second, verbalize it to someone else, make sure they understand, and get some feedback.

“We want our work to be beneficial to all of those four categories.”

Overall, Afsari and Collins both felt student attendance at the event was successful.

Afsari said lots of people visited the booth, and she was excited to see people interested in their work.

Collins said there was a “constant flow of people.”

Both said they made connections with industry representatives and exchanged business cards with people who might want to collaborate with the DBL.

According to Shelden, “Many new professional organizations were introduced to the DBL and expressed interest in participating with the activities of the DBL and Georgia Tech. We are in discussions with several of them regarding participation at Georgia Tech as DBL members, research sponsors, co-op student supporters, and educational mentors.”

The event was organized by the Digital Building Lab. Professor Chuck Eastman and Associate Professors Dennis Shelden and Russell Gentry gave a plenary presentation on “BIM 2.0: Data Coordination and Exchange in a Connected World.” Shelden and Gentry worked with the students to organize the event.

Tammy VuPham, a first-year student in the School of Industrial Design, and her former roommate at the International House shared their story of rooming together for a year.

Zorana Matic, a Ph.D. student in the School of Architecture and graduate research assistant at the SimTigrate Design Lab , talked with Georgia Tech first lady Val Peterson about deciding to come to Georgia Tech and the United States.

In early September Georgia Tech’s Office of International Education partnered with StoryCorps Atlanta and WREK to record interviews between members of the Tech community. Interviewees included undergraduate and graduate students, professors, administrators, spouses of students, and the first lady of Georgia Tech.

Their stories highlight some of the amazing global experiences and diversity of our community. Listen to them all here.
 

“Drawing, properly taught, is the best way of developing intelligence and forming judgment, for one learns to see and seeing is knowledge,” this advice by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc,the iconic 19th century French architect and theorist, is a timeless reminder that the ability to visually explore conceptual thought is fundamental to the study of architecture. These drawings require not only a skilled representation of the external world, but also an ability to translate complex internal, and often competing, ideas onto paper.  

The new Connell Workshop explores a wide range of these issues in hand drawing - tone, line, contour, gesture, composition, iterative geometry, and the humanistic forces that shape them. The School of Architecture is amongst the leading U.S. institutions in this way of critical thinking.  Whether it was charcoal on the walls of pre-historic cave paintings, graphite and ink on vellum through the 20th century, or electronic technology of the 21st century, these media are the basic tools by which we come to understand architectural design. In addition to the issues explored, no small benefit of drawing by hand is the slow, tactile, thought process required - focused thinking.

This new workshop is made possible by a generous gift from a former Georgia Tech professor and alumnus, Arnall T. “Pat” Connell.  Professor Connell came to Georgia Tech in the late 60’s from Ohio State University, Columbia University and the University of Virginia. In the early 70’s Pat became a pioneering champion of historic preservation in the Atlanta area. He organized a small group of forward thinking politicians, civic leaders and celebrities to found the “Save the Fox” movement, resulting in Atlanta’s beloved Fox Theatre being saved from the wrecking ball.  He and his late wife Martha, co-founded the Great American Gallery, Atlanta’s unique contribution to contemporary crafts and fine arts objects. Many of the works that they curated now reside in leading museums and private collections around the U.S.

Pat’s great legacy at Georgia Tech is his unwavering belief in the value of personal, hand crafted expression in the act of drawing. His support has allowed Lane Duncan to carry on critical investigations in both perception and conception - the way we see the world and the way we attempt to order the world. This work includes life drawing, examination of the work of Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo, studies in Euclidean, projective, and Islamic metaphorical geometries and “idea capture” design sketching.    

Mr. Duncan describes Professor Connell as, “A true scholar who believes that hand drawing is a vital ‘technology’ to seeing and understanding the world around us and that it is an essential tool for the architect no matter what generation.”

Drawing requires that all the sensory apparatus of the body participate in the process of creating an image of the observed or imagined stimulus. Unlike the camera, which records only a split-second view of the object, the act of drawing is not time-dependent. The act of image-making informs and instructs the brain to keep looking for all the messages being sent. The image-maker always decides when to make changes and when the work is ‘finished.’ The Gestalt is there for the taking by anyone. – Pat Connell, 2016

The Barbara G. Laurie NOMA Student Design Competition provides architecture students as well as students from related design disciplines with an opportunity to showcase their talents to design industry professionals from across the nation. This year, the competition challenged student teams to design the African American Cultural Museum and Community Center along Leimert Park Boulevard in the Leimert Park to support the already vibrant culture in the area (2016 Student Design Competition Brief). 

The Georgia Tech team included Bachelor of Science in Architecture student Skylar Royal, and Master of Architecture students James Waldon (President of GT NOMAS), Abaan Ali, Ricardo Baez, Jhordan Channer, Alexandria Davis, Lubi Dimitrova, Akeema Edwards, Jessyca Reese, Lauren Wells, Ming Yu and Joylyn Stroud (Civil Engineering). Faculty advisors Professor John Peponis, Professor Herman Howard, and part-time faculty Jihan Sherman mentored the team. 

Master of Architecture student Ali Abaan said, "The success of the design process was based on how we cohesively combined each persons interpretation of what the project should be. Its our individual statement piece formed into one design. As a result, the collaborative insertions of every single team member is imprinted in the final product."

Teams were encouraged to not only provide an identity for the struggling community, but integrate sustainability (energy and water efficient, day lighting, etc), design landscaping/site elements, activate the streetscape along Degnan Boulevard, as well as defend the financial feasibility of the design. Correlated diagrams, plans, sections, 3D perspectives, and details were used to effectively convey concepts and design intent.

“It was exciting to work with such a diverse group of students,” stated James Waldon, President of GT NOMAS, “not just on our skill level, but also within our own cultural backgrounds. Using these differences to our advantage, we were able to merge our ideas and backgrounds into an excellent design. The experience was great practice for professional development while celebrating minority contributions in architecture.” 

http://www.noma.net/

Georgia Institute of Technology architecture professor Charles Eastman is scheduled to receive the 2016 Society Award of Excellence presented by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) at the University of Michigan Taubman College in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Friday, October 28, 2016.

“This award honors Professor Eastman’s seminal role in founding and leading ACADIA in its earliest years, his pioneering work in the area of Building Information Modeling, Parametric Design, Collaborative Design, Visualization and Fabrication, and many other achievements. His influence in the field of digital design is second to none.” - ACADIA

Eastman is a pioneer of AEC CAD, developing research 3D and early solid and parametric modeling systems for the building industry starting in the middle 1970s. Trained as an architect at Berkeley, he focused on tool development for practitioners with the 'Building Description System' and 'Building Product Modeling', later re-branded as Building Information Modeling. He started the PhD program in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and founded ACADIA. He did a parametric modeling start-up (called FORMTEK) in the early 1980s and then joined University of California, Los Angeles, where he was for eight years before beginning his career at Georgia Tech in 1996 as a professor, and founder of the Digital Building Laboratory.

His research group at Georgia Tech addresses interoperability issues and platform level functionality. This includes precast concrete, steel fabrication, reinforced concrete workflow analyses, implementation of exchange models (Venugopal et al. 2012), and developing integration environments using CIS/2 and IFC.

http://www.arch.gatech.edu/charles-eastman

http://2016.acadia.org/awards.html 

AMAC Accessibility Solutions and Research Center this year marks 10 years of providing products and services to those with disabilities.

Also this year, the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA) moved from its location in a church on 10th Street to join AMAC in the same building on Means Street.

Being in the same building led the two Centers this year to create the Centers for Inclusive Design Innovation, which has already received funding for a project.

The Centers want to mark these milestones at an open house Thursday at their offices at 512 Means St., from 4-7 p.m.

Visitors will have the opportunity to tour their space, see demonstrations, such as AMAC’s braille machines used for tactile printing, and their student disability accommodation software.

CATEA will show various posters and demonstrations from current and past research projects. That includes the posters submitted to the TechSAge Design Competition for the GatePal app featured on the College of Design, and the TechSAge ALIGN app, which was mentioned in Atlanta Magazine and nominated for a Groundbreaker Award.

Transforming Accessibility in the College of Design

Although the approaches of the two Centers are different, they both use technology to assist people with disabilities and those aging with limitations.

Focused on helping students with disabilities, AMAC first offered services in 2006 at the University of Georgia. The Center moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. Center Director Christopher Lee, along with Noel Gregg and other colleagues at UGA, were the inspiration behind AMAC. Gregg worked with AMAC for a few years and has since retired.

Today AMAC has more than 50 staff members who serve 800 member institutions and hundreds more who use their services on an as-needed basis. Not bad for a Center that started with 14 members serving 100 universities.

During the past 10 years, AMAC faced challenges, “including reducing the high cost of accommodations … and integrating a business model that would leverage existing business partners,” Lee said in a statement.

AMAC overcame these challenges and Lee transformed the Center into “an international research and development organization focused on inclusive design in corporate offices, government organizations and nonprofit environments,” he said.

One of AMAC’s biggest grants is the First in The World Grant from the U.S. Department of Education which funds the research of the Center for Accessible Materials Innovation (CAMI). The multi-million-dollar grant will help the center study the graduation gap between students with disabilities and their peers without.

CATEA started as the Center for Rehabilitation Technology (CRT) in 1980, and became the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access in 1999.

CATEA’s focus today is on resources to help employers make accommodations decisions, promote accessible STEM education, and resources to promote health and wellness among seniors while also serving their accessibility needs.

In the past dozen years, CATEA had three national Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers funded by the federal government’s National Institute on Independent Living, Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

These are the largest ($4.5-$4.75 million over 5 years) and most prestigious awards made by NIDILRR, and funded CATEA projects: “Workplace Accommodations” (2003-2013), “Wheeled Mobility” (2004-2016), and currently “TechSAge” (2013-2018). Current funding also includes a $2.5 million, 5-year study to demonstrate that universal design is a more effective strategy than ADA-required workplace accommodations to engage workers with disabilities.

According to CATEA Director Jon Sanford, by dollar amount, AMAC and CATEA account for about 70 percent of the outside funding in the College, with CATEA as the second largest research center in the College of Design.

Building Georgia Tech’s Accessibility Legacy

The move to create the Centers for Inclusive Design Innovation (CIDI), gives AMAC and CATEA, the two largest centers in the College, the opportunity to collaborate on a larger level, Sanford said.

“CATEA has expertise in research, particularly related to technology and the environment. AMAC has expertise in training and service provision, particularly related to information technology and assistive technology. These complementary programs can strengthen each other,” he noted.

“For example, the new Assistive Software Knowledgebase project was actually awarded to CIDI, and will use the expertise of both CATEA and AMAC.

“CIDI provides an umbrella to show one face to the outside world without losing the identities and name recognition of either center,” Sanford said.

Dr. Economou gave the keynote address on the second day of the conference, titled “Fundamentals Reconsidered: Facts, Fictions, Fabrications”.

A number of GT expats also attended the conference including Myrsini Mamoli (PhD Architecture, 2014, now Assistant Professor at LSU), Tomas Grasl (Fulbright Scholar,2006, founding partner at SWAP Architects, Vienna), and Christian Lange (Visiting Assistant Professor, 2007, now Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University).

Located in the Langa Township outside of Cape Town, the project provides a place for local children and adolescents to discover the power of the arts through dance, music, and performance. With over 300,000 visitors annually, the Guga S’Thebe gladly welcomes this new 6,500 square foot facility to support their mission to teach and transform local youth and adolescents through the cultural arts. The project includes a multi-functional room for dance and music, areas for rehearsals, balconies, recording studio, a combination of small individual rooms for learning in small groups, a large multi-functional room, exterior stage, and a soup kitchen. The architecture promotes an awareness of sustainable solutions to low cost building construction by combining re-used or recycled post consumer industrialized waste materials with traditional earth construction methods.

The architecture students practice a sustainable handling of material, expanding their own knowledge base of material re-use and construction assembly into the community as they guide locals in learning these adapted methods of assembly. The program anticipates that students will return from this experience with a new global awareness of the power of architecture to inspire and improve the human spirit through a sustainable approach.

AIT Magazine has been instrumental in launching, and continuing to raise awareness for, the project thanks to their ongoing efforts in organizing events related to it. With completion slated for 2015, the project has already received two awards for sustainability from the STO Foundation, as well as Georgia Tech’s Dennis Award for Global Engagement.

To learn more about the project and ways to contribute, please contact Assistant Professor Daniel Baerlecken at daniel.baerlecken@coa.gatech.edu. To help de-fray the cost of construction supplies, the team has set up a fundraising page at indiegogo.com, http://bit.ly/1ubp43t, for those who would like to be a part of this project.

The installation by Damien Valero, Jerôme Cognet, Gernot Riether and Jérôme Pougnant will be on display at the Centre Culturel Bellegarde till March 24, 2012

Project Team:
Crimson Changsup Lee, Sabri Gökmen

The project was fabricated at the DFL, Digital Fabrication Laboratory at Georgia Tech.

Special thanks to Andres Cavieres.

The book focuses on Walter Benjamin's contribution to architectural thinking through four groups of essays addressing, respectively, nineteenth century interiors and the notion of dreamspace; twentieth century collective dreamworlds and the relationship between architecture, cinema, and the popular press; Benjamin`s writings on architecture in relation to art history, architectural theory, and philosophy; and Benjamin's relevance to architecture today.

The lavishly illustrated book includes contributions by Georges Teyssot, Martin Bressani, Marc Gringon, and Jean Luis Deotte, Lutz Robbers, Esther Leslie, Esthelle Thibault, Veronique Fabbri, Ken Knoespel, Betrand Lemoine, and Frances Hsu, Philippe Duboy, Antoine Picon, Mario Carpo, Nadir Lahiji, and Diane Morgan, including an extended preface by Andreotti, and an introductory essay by the noted philosopher Jean Paul Dollé.

INTRODUCTION
Seventy years after his death, Walter Benjamin’s popularity shows no sign of abating. A veritable torrent of books, conferences, exhibitions, films, commemorations attest to his rising status as XXth century’s most influential European cultural critic. Almost every area of the humanities, from history to philosophy, film and media studies, literary criticism, politics, and art, has felt the impact of Benjamin’s work. Within this farflung zone of influence, architecture occupies a special place, as the subject of what some consider to be Benjamin’s most important project, the Passagen-Werk, and the source of seminal reflections on the metropolitan experience, wish images, tactility, the aesthetics of shock, and the aestheticisation of politics -- to mention only some notions familiar to architectural scholars. For more than a generation now, Benjamin’s ideas have spread through architectural studies, opening up many new areas of research; yet despite its impact, Benjamin’s thinking on architecture has rarely been made the object of focussed or systematic study. As a result, the precise nature of his influence, the import of his ideas, and the questions of interpretation they pose for architectural scholars today remain largely unexamined.

One reason for this neglect is practical : Benjamin’s reflections on architecture are scattered across of large body of writing, often buried in discussions of apparently remote subjects. Furthermore, as any reader can attest, his writings do not lend themselves to easy summary, tending rather to generate different and at times even strongly divergent interpretations (depending on whether one wishes to emphasize, for instance, Benjamin’s role as a Marxist historian, or Frankfurt school philosopher, or Jewish mystic). To this, one must add the hagiographic approach of many of his devotees, which -- ironically for someone who welcomed the decline of aura -- does not generally encourage open and rational debate. This book is one effort to rescue Benjamin from the fate that so often befalls ‘difficult’ writers : to be often quoted but rarely read. Its goal is to consider critically Benjamin’s thinking from a point of view that is already in some part shaped by his work, to assess its effect on the history, theory, and practice of architecture, and consider its relevance today.

Spielraum : Benjamin and Architecture originated with a symposium organized in Paris in late 2007 under the title Architecture and the Technological Unconscious. Sponsored jointly by the College of Architecture of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, the conference brought together scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines to consider Benjamin’s writings from a historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspective. One of the goals of the meeting was to revisit notions that have played such an important role in recent years : among them the decline of aura, mechanical reproducibility, and the esthetics of shock. At the same time, as indicated in the conference’s title, the aim was to consider these issues from the standpoint of Benjamin’s larger concern for the new forms of experience generated through architecture and technology – particularly the new perceptual realms opened up by the press, photography, radio, cinema, up to and including the recent revolution brought on by digital media.

This volume presents, in a slightly different order that nevertheless respects the main sequence of themes, papers delivered at this event, including some commissioned after. The contributors make no claim to address all the questions Benjamin’s work raises for scholars, practitioners, and educators in the architectural field. Their goal is rather to open up Benjamin’s thinking to rigorous reflection, analysis and criticism, to highlight the centrality of architecture in his thought and to evaluate its influence on a field that has been profoundly shaped by his work. As Jean Paul Dollé makes clear in his foreword, Benjamin’s thinking is structured around a whole series of antinomies that remain, today, less than ever resolved. Central among them is the question of the ownership and control of the great power unleashed by technology, of the alienations it inflicts on the human sensorium, as well as the new possibilities it opens for expanded and more democratic forms of participation. Today, after more than half a century of accelerated change that has increased immeasurably technology’s power to control human hearts and minds, the same questions – reformulated in terms appropriate to the present – are as urgent as ever. At a time when, as Hal Foster notes in his afterword, architecture’s relentless integration into an increasingly global and centralized economy has resulted in the new market-driven phenomena of branding and celebrity architecture, Benjamin’s reflections are one necessary starting point for any theory of architecture that aspires to a degree of social and political relevance.

In the interval between graduation from Georgia Tech and the commencement ofhis graduate studies at  Princeton,  Brandon’s professionalexperiences  have included guest lectureships and participation on Juriesat US schools of architecture; designer of Installations and participant indesign Exhibits in the U.S., Europe, and Asia; as well as a writer offrequently published articles in design journals and professional publications.In continuing an interest in translating past methods of making into acontemporary digital process. 

Brandon plans to utilize his Research Fellowship to travel to countries onfour (4) continents to carry out his research on the topic, “Volume: Researching Past Methods of Stereotomy.”  As Brandon explained, “Wehave lost the ability to work with Volume.  So much of the discussionsurrounding digital design has focused on the surface… This research isintended to mine the lost knowledge of stereotomy  (the art of cuttingsolids, most typically stone) as a way to inform our contemporary methods of makingwith the dimension of volume.”

Commencing in September 2011, Brandon will hold the position of LeFevreEmerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University, where he will teachand carry out research on the broader topic of stereotomy in the digital era,with the intent to leverage the knowledge gained through his SOM FoundationFellowship travel and research to augment the research he will undertake atOSU.

The SOM Prize is awarded annually through a national competition.  InJuly 2011, the SOM Foundation received 105 portfolio submissions from studentsat 45 US schools having accredited programs in architecture, design and urbandesign.  The submissions were judged on the quality of the designportfolios, research proposals and travel itineraries.

The mission of the SOM Foundation Travelling Fellowship Program is to assistyoung architects, designers and engineers in expanding their professionaleducation through the observations of culture, history, building and designthat can only be achieved through travel.  Prior Fellows have travelled toAsia, North Africa, and South America, as well as Europe and the United States.

The programs of the SOM Foundation are funded through an endowmentestablished by the partners of the architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings &Merrill LLP (SOM).  The Foundation’s activities are wholly separate fromthose of the firm.

In this 30^th year of Foundation Awards, the Fellowships continueto offer recent graduates the rare opportunity to travel in connection withcarrying out in-depth research, collaborate with other professionals and pursueindependent study outside the realm of established patterns.  

To date, the Foundation has awarded more than $1,000,000 to architecture,design and engineering students who have gone on to distinguish themselves inprofessional and academic careers.